Action Recognition using Time-series Heat Maps of Joint Positions from Volleyball Match Videos

Akimasa Kondo, Hideo Saito, Shoji Yachida, Ryo Fujiwara

Abstract: Data analysis in sports is becoming increasingly important, and one of the sports in which sports analysts play an active role is volleyball. Volleyball analysts have the task of annotating match videos, a time-consuming and technically challenging task that makes use of data difficult. In this paper, we propose a method for recognizing players' actions from volleyball game videos using time-series heat maps of joint positions to automate the analysis of volleyball match videos. In experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we confirmed that the use of time-series heat maps of joint positions improves both the accuracy and F1 score compared to the baseline method using only RGB images as an input. We also confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method in recognizing players' actions from volleyball match videos, which were not included in the dataset.