Automated individual-player kill attribution

Resolve kill attribution at the individual-player level in amateur single-camera volleyball video so that terminal attacks can be both detected and assigned reliably to the player who made them, rather than requiring coach confirmation.

Background

Kill attribution is especially difficult because a kill is a contested, high-velocity contact that may be made by any of six players converging in the same area, often while players are jumping, turned away, or occluded. The paper finds that team-level kill totals can appear accurate even when the underlying player-level attribution is nearly random.

A rule that inserts a plausible terminal attack when the event spotter misses one improves event recovery but does not reliably identify the acting player. The authors consequently report individual-player kill statistics as coach-confirmed rather than fully automated.