Football for all: Towards procedural spatial audio for blind and low-vision spectators

This paper describes Football for All , a modular system that transforms football broadcast video into an immersive, headphone-based spatial audio experience for blind and low-vision (BLV) spectators. The system integrates: (i) a computer vision pipeline for detecting and tracking players and the ball, estimating pitch calibration, and converting image detections into pitch coordinates; (ii) a dense action spotting module that temporally localizes ball-related events with strict 1-second precision; and (iii) a Unity-based logic engine that processes a structured game-state stream and generates procedurally created 3D spatial audio using head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) and head tracking. The audio engine renders in real time, but the current prototype is not yet a live system: the computer-vision stage processes pre-recorded broadcast footage sequentially to preserve identity consistency, and end-to-end latency has not yet been measured. The design supports robust post-processing under occlusions and viewpoint changes, and an event-to-sound audio lexicon that reduces listener cognitive load by mapping football semantics to distinct acoustic cues.