Tracking methods in sport: review of advances, quality, and challenges in performance data

• DOI: 10.1055/a-2577-2739
• Publication Date: 2025-04-09T00:09:11Z
• Authors: Felipe A Moura; Fabio Giuliano Ca...; Ricardo da Silva ...

Tracking systems in sports aim to record athlete’s position as a function of time. From these data, information on physical, tactical and technical performance is obtained and assists coaches and players in decision-making during the training and competition routine. The implementation, feasibility, and quality of data generated by tracking systems depend on the conditions of each sporting environment and their requirements. This narrative review addresses the fundamentals of the main tracking systems, including algorithms based on computer vision and artificial intelligence for processing videos, global (GPS and GNSS) and local (LPS) positioning systems. We also address technological advances for obtaining data from human pose estimation and the main validation or quality analysis studies of each method. Finally, we present a series of recommendations and future directions for the evaluation and development of automatic and accurate athlete tracking tools.