Classifying Soccer Ball-on-Goal Position Through Kicker Shooting Action

Javier Artiles, Daniel Hernández-Sosa, Oliverio Santana, Javier Lorenzo-Navarro, David Freire-Obregón

2024

Abstract

This research addresses whether the ball’s direction after a soccer free-kick can be accurately predicted solely by observing the shooter’s kicking technique. To investigate this, we meticulously curated a dataset of soccer players executing free kicks and conducted manual temporal segmentation to identify the moment of the kick precisely. Our approach involves utilizing neural networks to develop a model that integrates Human Action Recognition (HAR) embeddings with contextual information, predicting the ball-on-goal position (BoGP) based on two temporal states: the kicker’s run-up and the instant of the kick. The study encompasses a performance evaluation for eleven distinct HAR backbones, shedding light on their effectiveness in BoGP estimation during free-kick situations. An extra tabular metadata input is introduced, leading to an interesting model enhancement without introducing bias. The promising results reveal 69.1% accuracy when considering two primary BoGP classes: right and left. This underscores the model’s proficiency in predicting the ball’s destination towards the goal with high accuracy, offering promising implications for understanding free-kick dynamics in soccer.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Artiles J., Hernández-Sosa D., Santana O., Lorenzo-Navarro J. and Freire-Obregón D. (2024). Classifying Soccer Ball-on-Goal Position Through Kicker Shooting Action. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM; ISBN 978-989-758-684-2, SciTePress, pages 79-90. DOI: 10.5220/0012417100003654

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icpram24,
author={Javier Artiles and Daniel Hernández-Sosa and Oliverio Santana and Javier Lorenzo-Navarro and David Freire-Obregón},
title={Classifying Soccer Ball-on-Goal Position Through Kicker Shooting Action},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM},
year={2024},
pages={79-90},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012417100003654},
isbn={978-989-758-684-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM
TI - Classifying Soccer Ball-on-Goal Position Through Kicker Shooting Action
SN - 978-989-758-684-2
AU - Artiles J.
AU - Hernández-Sosa D.
AU - Santana O.
AU - Lorenzo-Navarro J.
AU - Freire-Obregón D.
PY - 2024
SP - 79
EP - 90
DO - 10.5220/0012417100003654
PB - SciTePress