Event detection in coarsely annotated sports videos via parallel multi receptive field 1D convolutions
This addresses the problem of practical event detection for sports analytics by handling coarse annotations, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for video analysis.
The paper tackles event detection in sports videos with coarse annotations by proposing a multi-tower temporal convolutional network that processes information at various temporal scales, achieving a 55% average F1 score on the NHL dataset and competitive performance on SoccerNet.
In problems such as sports video analytics, it is difficult to obtain accurate frame level annotations and exact event duration because of the lengthy videos and sheer volume of video data. This issue is even more pronounced in fast-paced sports such as ice hockey. Obtaining annotations on a coarse scale can be much more practical and time efficient. We propose the task of event detection in coarsely annotated videos. We introduce a multi-tower temporal convolutional network architecture for the proposed task. The network, with the help of multiple receptive fields, processes information at various temporal scales to account for the uncertainty with regard to the exact event location and duration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the multi-receptive field architecture through appropriate ablation studies. The method is evaluated on two tasks - event detection in coarsely annotated hockey videos in the NHL dataset and event spotting in soccer on the SoccerNet dataset. The two datasets lack frame-level annotations and have very distinct event frequencies. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the network by obtaining a 55% average F1 score on the NHL dataset and by achieving competitive performance compared to the state of the art on the SoccerNet dataset. We believe our approach will help develop more practical pipelines for event detection in sports video.