The Video Assistant Referee (VAR) has revolutionized association football, enabling referees to review incidents on the pitch, make informed decisions, and ensure fairness. However, due to the lack of referees in many countries and the high cost of the VAR infrastructure, only professional leagues can benefit from it. In this paper, we propose a Video Assistant Referee System (VARS) that can automate soccer decision-making. VARS leverages the latest findings in multi-view video analysis, to provide real-time feedback to the referee, and help them make informed decisions that can impact the outcome of a game. To validate VARS, we introduce SoccerNet-MVFoul, a novel video dataset of soccer fouls from multiple camera views, annotated with extensive foul descriptions by a professional soccer referee, and we benchmark our VARS to automatically recognize the characteristics of these fouls. We believe that VARS has the potential to revolutionize soccer refereeing and take the game to new heights of fairness and accuracy across all levels of professional and amateur federations.

翻译：视频助理裁判（VAR）革新了协会足球运动，使裁判能够审查场上事件、做出明智判罚并确保公平性。然而，由于许多国家缺乏专业裁判且VAR基础设施成本高昂，目前仅有职业联赛可从中受益。本文提出了一种能自动化足球判罚决策的视频助理裁判系统（VARS）。VARS利用多视角视频分析领域的最新研究成果，向裁判提供实时反馈，辅助其做出可能影响比赛结果的关键判罚。为验证VARS，我们构建了SoccerNet-MVFoul——一个包含多摄像机视角足球犯规事件的全新视频数据集，并由职业足球裁判对犯规特征进行了详尽标注。我们以此为基准评估VARS自动识别犯规特征的能力。我们相信，VARS有望革新足球裁判体系，将公平性与判罚精准度提升至新高度，惠及各级职业及业余足球联合会。