Lagatar24 desk
New Delhi, july 2: The FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar will begin on November 21. Semi-automated offside technology will be deployed, providing a support tool for the video match officials and the on-field officials to enable them to make faster, more precise, and more repeatable offside rulings on the grandest stage of all.
After the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, when VAR was successfully implemented, FIFA President Gianni Infantino stated in The Vision 2020–23 that FIFA would work to fully utilize technology in football and further develop VAR.
FIFA has, in fact, been at the forefront of gaming technology for the last three years. FIFA has spent the last few years enhancing the VAR system, including the deployment of semi-automated offside technology, in collaboration with Adidas and a number of partners, particularly the Working Group for Innovation Excellence and technology vendors.
The new technology tracks the ball using 12 dedicated tracking cameras positioned below the stadium’s roof and analyzes up to 29 data points for each player, 50 times per second, to determine their precise location on the field.
All limbs and extremities that are important for determining side are represented in the 29 data points that were gathered. An additional crucial component for the detection of narrow offside situations will be provided by Al Rihla, Adidas’ official match ball for Qatar 2022, since an inertial measuring unit (IMU) sensor will be inserted inside the ball.
The kick point may be identified with extreme precision thanks to this sensor, which is located in the center of the ball and feeds ball data to the video operation room 500 times per second.
The innovative system automatically alerts the video match officials inside the video operation room whenever the ball is received by an attacker who was in an offside position when the ball was played by a teammate by merging the limb- and ball-tracking data and applying artificial intelligence.
The video match officials personally verify the automatically generated kick point and the automatically generated offside line, which are based on the computed positions of the players’ limbs, before advising the on-field referee of the proposed decision. Offside decisions may be made more quickly and precisely thanks to this technique, which just takes a few seconds to complete.
The exact same positional data points that were used to make the decision are then generated into a 3D animation that precisely depicts the position of the players’ limbs at the time the ball was played. This is done after the decision has been confirmed by the video match officials and the referee on the field.
This 3D animation will then be exhibited on the stadium’s massive displays and made available to FIFA’s broadcast partners in order to notify all spectators as clearly as possible. It will always show the finest views for an offside situation.
