# MultiSports: A Multi-Person Video Dataset of Spatio-Temporally Localized Sports Actions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07404 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07404/

## Key facts

- Cited by 84 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08421/) (2017)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09702/) (2019)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [Video Action Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02707/) (2018)
- [BSN: Boundary Sensitive Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02964/) (2018)
- [Temporal Action Detection with Structured Segment Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06228/) (2017)
- [Long-Term Feature Banks for Detailed Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05038/) (2018)
- [FineGym: A Hierarchical Video Dataset for Fine-grained Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06704/) (2020)
- [The THUMOS Challenge on Action Recognition for Videos "in the Wild"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06182/) (2016)
- [Graph Convolutional Networks for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03252/) (2019)
- [R-C3D: Region Convolutional 3D Network for Temporal Activity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07814/) (2017)
- [Every Moment Counts: Dense Detailed Labeling of Actions in Complex Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05738/) (2015)
- [The Devil is in the Tails: Fine-grained Classification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01450/) (2017)
- [The AVA-Kinetics Localized Human Actions Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00214/) (2020)
- [Action Tubelet Detector for Spatio-Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01861/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [Sequential Modeling Enables Scalable Learning for Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00785/) (2023)
- [Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17432/) (2023)
- [SportsMOT: A Large Multi-Object Tracking Dataset in Multiple Sports Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05170/) (2023)
- [FineDiving: A Fine-grained Dataset for Procedure-aware Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03646/) (2022)
- [FineAction: A Fine-Grained Video Dataset for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11107/) (2021)
- [Merlin:Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Minds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00589/) (2023)
- [Sports-QA: A Large-Scale Video Question Answering Benchmark for Complex and Professional Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01505/) (2024)
- [Spotting Temporally Precise, Fine-Grained Events in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10213/) (2022)
- [MMSI-Video-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Video-Based Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10863/) (2025)
- [LOGO: A Long-Form Video Dataset for Group Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05029/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Video Action Recognition in Sports: Datasets, Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01038/) (2022)
- [Holistic Interaction Transformer Network for Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12686/) (2022)
- [FineParser: A Fine-grained Spatio-temporal Action Parser for Human-centric Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06887/) (2024)
- [SPORTU: A Comprehensive Sports Understanding Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08474/) (2024)
- [STMixer: A One-Stage Sparse Action Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15879/) (2023)
- [Efficient Video Action Detection with Token Dropout and Context Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08451/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Spatio-Temporal Action Localisation with Video Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12160/) (2023)
- [MotionTrack: Learning Motion Predictor for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02585/) (2023)
- [NurViD: A Large Expert-Level Video Database for Nursing Procedure Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13347/) (2023)
- [Dual DETRs for Multi-Label Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00653/) (2024)
- [BASKET: A Large-Scale Video Dataset for Fine-Grained Skill Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20781/) (2025)
- [TimeBalance: Temporally-Invariant and Temporally-Distinctive Video Representations for Semi-Supervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16268/) (2023)
- [ShuttleSet: A Human-Annotated Stroke-Level Singles Dataset for Badminton Tactical Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04948/) (2023)
- [SportsHHI: A Dataset for Human-Human Interaction Detection in Sports Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04565/) (2024)
- [Spatio-Temporal Action Detection Under Large Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02250/) (2022)
- [MotionBank: A Large-scale Video Motion Benchmark with Disentangled Rule-based Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13790/) (2024)
- [Video Action Differencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07860/) (2025)
- [Panoramic Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03806/) (2022)
- [Cross-Architecture Self-supervised Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13313/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning in Sports Applications: Perception, Comprehension, and Decision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03353/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatio-temporal action detection is an important and challenging problem in video understanding. The existing action detection benchmarks are limited in aspects of small numbers of instances in a trimmed video or low-level atomic actions. This paper aims to present a new multi-person dataset of spatio-temporal localized sports actions, coined as MultiSports. We first analyze the important ingredients of constructing a realistic and challenging dataset for spatio-temporal action detection by proposing three criteria: (1) multi-person scenes and motion dependent identification, (2) with well-defined boundaries, (3) relatively fine-grained classes of high complexity. Based on these guide-lines, we build the dataset of MultiSports v1.0 by selecting 4 sports classes, collecting 3200 video clips, and annotating 37701 action instances with 902k bounding boxes. Our datasets are characterized with important properties of high diversity, dense annotation, and high quality. Our Multi-Sports, with its realistic setting and detailed annotations, exposes the intrinsic challenges of spatio-temporal action detection. To benchmark this, we adapt several baseline methods to our dataset and give an in-depth analysis on the action detection results in our dataset. We hope our MultiSports can serve as a standard benchmark for spatio-temporal action detection in the future. Our dataset website is at https://deeperaction.github.io/multisports/.