Football Action Recognition Using Hierarchical LSTM

Takamasa Tsunoda, Yasuhiro Komori, Masakazu Matsugu, Tatsuya Harada; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2017, pp. 99-107

We present a hierarchical recurrent network for understanding team sports activity in image and location sequences. In the hierarchical model, we integrate proposed multiple person-centered features over a temporal sequence based on LSTM's outputs. To achieve this scheme, we introduce the Keeping state in LSTM as one of externally controllable states, and extend the Hierarchical LSTMs to include mechanism for the integration. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed framework involving hierarchical LSTM and person-centered feature. In this study, we demonstrate improvement over the reference model. Specifically, by incorporating the person-centered feature with meta-information (e.g., location data) in our proposed late fusion framework, we also demonstrate increased discriminability of action categories and enhanced robustness against fluctuation in the number of observed players.