Daily Papers

Robust ball tracking under occlusion remains a key challenge in sports video analysis, affecting tasks like event detection and officiating. We present TOTNet, a Temporal Occlusion Tracking Network that leverages 3D convolutions, visibility-weighted loss, and occlusion augmentation to improve performance under partial and full occlusions. Developed in collaboration with Paralympics Australia, TOTNet is designed for real-world sports analytics. We introduce TTA, a new occlusion-rich table tennis dataset collected from professional-level Paralympic matches, comprising 9,159 samples with 1,996 occlusion cases. Evaluated on four datasets across tennis, badminton, and table tennis, TOTNet significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods, reducing RMSE from 37.30 to 7.19 and improving accuracy on fully occluded frames from 0.63 to 0.80. These results demonstrate TOTNets effectiveness for offline sports analytics in fast-paced scenarios. Code and data access:https://github.com/AugustRushG/TOTNet{AugustRushG/TOTNet}.

Video event detection is central to modern sports analytics, enabling automated understanding of key moments for performance evaluation, content creation, and tactical feedback. While deep learning has significantly advanced tasks like Temporal Action Localization (TAL), Action Spotting (AS), and Precise Event Spotting (PES), existing surveys often overlook the fine-grained temporal demands and domain-specific challenges posed by sports. This survey first provides a clear conceptual distinction between TAL, AS, and PES, then introduces a methods-based taxonomy covering recent deep learning approaches for AS and PES, including feature-based pipelines, end-to-end architectures, and multimodal strategies. We further review benchmark datasets and evaluation protocols, identifying critical limitations such as reliance on broadcast-quality footage and lenient multi-label metrics that hinder real-world deployment. Finally, we outline open challenges and future directions toward more temporally precise, generalizable, and practical event spotting in sports video analysis.

Sports analytics benefits from recent advances in machine learning providing a competitive advantage for teams or individuals. One important task in this context is the performance measurement of individual players to provide reports and log files for subsequent analysis. During sport events like basketball, this involves the re-identification of players during a match either from multiple camera viewpoints or from a single camera viewpoint at different times. In this work, we investigate whether it is possible to transfer the out-standing zero-shot performance of pre-trained CLIP models to the domain of player re-identification. For this purpose we reformulate the contrastive language-to-image pre-training approach from CLIP to a contrastive image-to-image training approach using the InfoNCE loss as training objective. Unlike previous work, our approach is entirely class-agnostic and benefits from large-scale pre-training. With a fine-tuned CLIP ViT-L/14 model we achieve 98.44 % mAP on the MMSports 2022 Player Re-Identification challenge. Furthermore we show that the CLIP Vision Transformers have already strong OCR capabilities to identify useful player features like shirt numbers in a zero-shot manner without any fine-tuning on the dataset. By applying the Score-CAM algorithm we visualise the most important image regions that our fine-tuned model identifies when calculating the similarity score between two images of a player.

In sports analytics, accurately capturing both the 3D locations and rotations of body joints is essential for understanding an athlete's biomechanics. While Human Mesh Recovery (HMR) models can estimate joint rotations, they often exhibit lower accuracy in joint localization compared to 3D Human Pose Estimation (HPE) models. Recent work addressed this limitation by combining a 3D HPE model with inverse kinematics (IK) to estimate both joint locations and rotations. However, IK is computationally expensive. To overcome this, we propose a novel 2D-to-3D uplifting model that directly estimates 3D human poses, including joint rotations, in a single forward pass. We investigate multiple rotation representations, loss functions, and training strategies - both with and without access to ground truth rotations. Our models achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in rotation estimation, are 150 times faster than the IK-based approach, and surpass HMR models in joint localization precision.

The integration of artificial intelligence in sports analytics has transformed soccer video understanding, enabling real-time, automated insights into complex game dynamics. Traditional approaches rely on isolated data streams, limiting their effectiveness in capturing the full context of a match. To address this, we introduce SoccerChat, a multimodal conversational AI framework that integrates visual and textual data for enhanced soccer video comprehension. Leveraging the extensive SoccerNet dataset, enriched with jersey color annotations and automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts, SoccerChat is fine-tuned on a structured video instruction dataset to facilitate accurate game understanding, event classification, and referee decision making. We benchmark SoccerChat on action classification and referee decision-making tasks, demonstrating its performance in general soccer event comprehension while maintaining competitive accuracy in referee decision making. Our findings highlight the importance of multimodal integration in advancing soccer analytics, paving the way for more interactive and explainable AI-driven sports analysis. https://github.com/simula/SoccerChat

The application of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology in soccer offers numerous opportunities for sports analytics. Specifically, extracting audio commentaries with ASR provides valuable insights into the events of the game, and opens the door to several downstream applications such as automatic highlight generation. This paper presents SoccerNet-Echoes, an augmentation of the SoccerNet dataset with automatically generated transcriptions of audio commentaries from soccer game broadcasts, enhancing video content with rich layers of textual information derived from the game audio using ASR. These textual commentaries, generated using the Whisper model and translated with Google Translate, extend the usefulness of the SoccerNet dataset in diverse applications such as enhanced action spotting, automatic caption generation, and game summarization. By incorporating textual data alongside visual and auditory content, SoccerNet-Echoes aims to serve as a comprehensive resource for the development of algorithms specialized in capturing the dynamics of soccer games. We detail the methods involved in the curation of this dataset and the integration of ASR. We also highlight the implications of a multimodal approach in sports analytics, and how the enriched dataset can support diverse applications, thus broadening the scope of research and development in the field of sports analytics.

The rapid evolution of digital sports media necessitates sophisticated information retrieval systems that can efficiently parse extensive multimodal datasets. This paper introduces SoccerRAG, an innovative framework designed to harness the power of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract soccer-related information through natural language queries. By leveraging a multimodal dataset, SoccerRAG supports dynamic querying and automatic data validation, enhancing user interaction and accessibility to sports archives. Our evaluations indicate that SoccerRAG effectively handles complex queries, offering significant improvements over traditional retrieval systems in terms of accuracy and user engagement. The results underscore the potential of using RAG and LLMs in sports analytics, paving the way for future advancements in the accessibility and real-time processing of sports data.

Large language models hold significant potential for integrating various data types, such as text documents and database records, for advanced analytics. However, blending text and numerical data presents substantial challenges. LLMs need to process and cross-reference entities and numbers, handle data inconsistencies and redundancies, and develop planning capabilities such as building a working memory for managing complex data queries. In this paper, we introduce four novel tasks centered around sports data analytics to evaluate the numerical reasoning and information fusion capabilities of LLMs. These tasks involve providing LLMs with detailed, play-by-play sports game descriptions, then challenging them with adversarial scenarios such as new game rules, longer durations, scrambled narratives, and analyzing key statistics in game summaries. We conduct extensive experiments on NBA and NFL games to assess the performance of LLMs on these tasks. Our benchmark, SportsMetrics, introduces a new mechanism for assessing LLMs' numerical reasoning and fusion skills.

The advent of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has expanded AI capabilities to visual modalities, yet existing evaluation benchmarks remain limited to single-video understanding, overlooking the critical need for multi-video understanding in real-world scenarios (e.g., sports analytics and autonomous driving). To address this significant gap, we introduce MVU-Eval, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Multi-Video Understanding for MLLMs. Specifically, our MVU-Eval mainly assesses eight core competencies through 1,824 meticulously curated question-answer pairs spanning 4,959 videos from diverse domains, addressing both fundamental perception tasks and high-order reasoning tasks. These capabilities are rigorously aligned with real-world applications such as multi-sensor synthesis in autonomous systems and cross-angle sports analytics. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source models, we reveal significant performance discrepancies and limitations in current MLLMs' ability to perform understanding across multiple videos. The benchmark will be made publicly available to foster future research.

We present a framework for the unsupervised learning of neurosymbolic encoders, which are encoders obtained by composing neural networks with symbolic programs from a domain-specific language. Our framework naturally incorporates symbolic expert knowledge into the learning process, which leads to more interpretable and factorized latent representations compared to fully neural encoders. We integrate modern program synthesis techniques with the variational autoencoding (VAE) framework, in order to learn a neurosymbolic encoder in conjunction with a standard decoder. The programmatic descriptions from our encoders can benefit many analysis workflows, such as in behavior modeling where interpreting agent actions and movements is important. We evaluate our method on learning latent representations for real-world trajectory data from animal biology and sports analytics. We show that our approach offers significantly better separation of meaningful categories than standard VAEs and leads to practical gains on downstream analysis tasks, such as for behavior classification.

We present SpineTrack, the first comprehensive dataset for 2D spine pose estimation in unconstrained settings, addressing a crucial need in sports analytics, healthcare, and realistic animation. Existing pose datasets often simplify the spine to a single rigid segment, overlooking the nuanced articulation required for accurate motion analysis. In contrast, SpineTrack annotates nine detailed spinal keypoints across two complementary subsets: a synthetic set comprising 25k annotations created using Unreal Engine with biomechanical alignment through OpenSim, and a real-world set comprising over 33k annotations curated via an active learning pipeline that iteratively refines automated annotations with human feedback. This integrated approach ensures anatomically consistent labels at scale, even for challenging, in-the-wild images. We further introduce SpinePose, extending state-of-the-art body pose estimators using knowledge distillation and an anatomical regularization strategy to jointly predict body and spine keypoints. Our experiments in both general and sports-specific contexts validate the effectiveness of SpineTrack for precise spine pose estimation, establishing a robust foundation for future research in advanced biomechanical analysis and 3D spine reconstruction in the wild.

Spatio-temporal reasoning is essential in understanding real-world environments in various fields, eg, autonomous driving and sports analytics. Recent advances have improved the spatial reasoning ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by introducing large-scale data, but these models still struggle to analyze kinematic elements like traveled distance and speed of moving objects. To bridge this gap, we construct a spatio-temporal reasoning dataset and benchmark involving kinematic instruction tuning, referred to as STKit and STKit-Bench. They consist of real-world videos with 3D annotations, detailing object motion dynamics: traveled distance, speed, movement direction, inter-object distance comparisons, and relative movement direction. To further scale such data construction to videos without 3D labels, we propose an automatic pipeline to generate pseudo-labels using 4D reconstruction in real-world scale. With our kinematic instruction tuning data for spatio-temporal reasoning, we present ST-VLM, a VLM enhanced for spatio-temporal reasoning, which exhibits outstanding performance on STKit-Bench. Furthermore, we show that ST-VLM generalizes robustly across diverse domains and tasks, outperforming baselines on other spatio-temporal benchmarks (eg, ActivityNet, TVQA+). Finally, by integrating learned spatio-temporal reasoning with existing abilities, ST-VLM enables complex multi-step reasoning. Project page: https://ikodoh.github.io/ST-VLM.

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized the way we analyze sports videos, whether to understand the actions of games in long untrimmed videos or to anticipate the player's motion in future frames. Despite these efforts, little attention has been given to anticipating game actions before they occur. In this work, we introduce the task of action anticipation for football broadcast videos, which consists in predicting future actions in unobserved future frames, within a five- or ten-second anticipation window. To benchmark this task, we release a new dataset, namely the SoccerNet Ball Action Anticipation dataset, based on SoccerNet Ball Action Spotting. Additionally, we propose a Football Action ANticipation TRAnsformer (FAANTRA), a baseline method that adapts FUTR, a state-of-the-art action anticipation model, to predict ball-related actions. To evaluate action anticipation, we introduce new metrics, including mAP@δ, which evaluates the temporal precision of predicted future actions, as well as mAP@infty, which evaluates their occurrence within the anticipation window. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to examine the impact of various task settings, input configurations, and model architectures. Experimental results highlight both the feasibility and challenges of action anticipation in football videos, providing valuable insights into the design of predictive models for sports analytics. By forecasting actions before they unfold, our work will enable applications in automated broadcasting, tactical analysis, and player decision-making. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/MohamadDalal/FAANTRA.

Quantifying sponsor visibility in sports broadcasts is a critical marketing task traditionally hindered by manual, subjective, and unscalable analysis methods. While automated systems offer an alternative, their reliance on axis-aligned Horizontal Bounding Box (HBB) leads to inaccurate exposuremetrics when logos appear rotated or skewed due to dynamic camera angles and perspective distortions. This paper introduces ExposureEngine, an end-to-end system designed for accurate, rotation-aware sponsor visibility analytics in sports broadcasts, demonstrated in a soccer case study. Our approach predicts Oriented Bounding Box (OBB) to provide a geometrically precise fit to each logo regardless of the orientation on-screen. To train and evaluate our detector, we developed a new dataset comprising 1,103 frames from Swedish elite soccer, featuring 670 unique sponsor logos annotated with OBBs. Our model achieves a mean Average Precision ([email protected]) of 0.859, with a precision of 0.96 and recall of 0.87, demonstrating robust performance in localizing logos under diverse broadcast conditions. The system integrates these detections into an analytical pipeline that calculates precise visibility metrics, such as exposure duration and on-screen coverage. Furthermore, we incorporate a language-driven agentic layer, enabling users to generate reports, summaries, and media content through natural language queries. The complete system, including the dataset and the analytics dashboard, provides a comprehensive solution for auditable and interpretable sponsor measurement in sports media. An overview of the ExposureEngine is available online: https://youtu.be/tRw6OBISuW4 .

The rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has opened unprecedented analytics possibilities in various team and individual sports, including baseball, basketball, and tennis. More recently, AI techniques have been applied to football, due to a huge increase in data collection by professional teams, increased computational power, and advances in machine learning, with the goal of better addressing new scientific challenges involved in the analysis of both individual players' and coordinated teams' behaviors. The research challenges associated with predictive and prescriptive football analytics require new developments and progress at the intersection of statistical learning, game theory, and computer vision. In this paper, we provide an overarching perspective highlighting how the combination of these fields, in particular, forms a unique microcosm for AI research, while offering mutual benefits for professional teams, spectators, and broadcasters in the years to come. We illustrate that this duality makes football analytics a game changer of tremendous value, in terms of not only changing the game of football itself, but also in terms of what this domain can mean for the field of AI. We review the state-of-the-art and exemplify the types of analysis enabled by combining the aforementioned fields, including illustrative examples of counterfactual analysis using predictive models, and the combination of game-theoretic analysis of penalty kicks with statistical learning of player attributes. We conclude by highlighting envisioned downstream impacts, including possibilities for extensions to other sports (real and virtual).

The scarcity of comprehensive datasets in surveillance, identification, image retrieval systems, and healthcare poses a significant challenge for researchers in exploring new methodologies and advancing knowledge in these respective fields. Furthermore, the need for full-body image datasets with detailed attributes like height, weight, age, and gender is particularly significant in areas such as fashion industry analytics, ergonomic design assessment, virtual reality avatar creation, and sports performance analysis. To address this gap, we have created the 'Celeb-FBI' dataset which contains 7,211 full-body images of individuals accompanied by detailed information on their height, age, weight, and gender. Following the dataset creation, we proceed with the preprocessing stages, including image cleaning, scaling, and the application of Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE). Subsequently, utilizing this prepared dataset, we employed three deep learning approaches: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), 50-layer ResNet, and 16-layer VGG, which are used for estimating height, weight, age, and gender from human full-body images. From the results obtained, ResNet-50 performed best for the system with an accuracy rate of 79.18% for age, 95.43% for gender, 85.60% for height and 81.91% for weight.