mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Survey on Video Action Recognition in Sports: Datasets, Methods and Applications

arXiv 2206.01038 ↗First posted 2 Jun 2022cs.CV cs.AI cs.MMcited by 27

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Abstract (arXiv)

To understand human behaviors, action recognition based on videos is a common approach. Compared with image-based action recognition, videos provide much more information. Reducing the ambiguity of actions and in the last decade, many works focused on datasets, novel models and learning approaches have improved video action recognition to a higher level. However, there are challenges and unsolved problems, in particular in sports analytics where data collection and labeling are more sophisticated, requiring sport professionals to annotate data. In addition, the actions could be extremely fast and it becomes difficult to recognize them. Moreover, in team sports like football and basketball, one action could involve multiple players, and to correctly recognize them, we need to analyse all players, which is relatively complicated. In this paper, we present a survey on video action recognition for sports analytics. We introduce more than ten types of sports, including team sports, such as football, basketball, volleyball, hockey and individual sports, such as figure skating, gymnastics, table tennis, tennis, diving and badminton. Then we compare numerous existing frameworks for sports analysis to present status quo of video action recognition in both team sports and individual sports. Finally, we discuss the challenges and unsolved problems in this area and to facilitate sports analytics, we develop a toolbox using PaddlePaddle, which supports football, basketball, table tennis and figure skating action recognition.

Key facts. Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 149 of its 370 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2022.

Builds on

149 of 370 references.

References · 149

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50 most cited of 149 All 149 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 7; 2024: 6; 2025: 8; 2026: 5.

27 papers.

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  1. 2023SoccerNet-Caption: Dense Video Captioning for Soccer Broadcasts Commentariescited by 57
  2. 2023VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Viewscited by 38
  3. 2024A Survey on Generative AI and LLM for Video Generation, Understanding, and Streamingcited by 37
  4. 2023ShuttleSet: A Human-Annotated Stroke-Level Singles Dataset for Badminton Tactical Analysiscited by 13
  5. 2023A Survey of Deep Learning in Sports Applications: Perception, Comprehension, and Decisioncited by 11
  6. 2025Action Anticipation from SoccerNet Football Video Broadcastscited by 9
  7. 2025SoccerChat: Integrating Multimodal Data for Enhanced Soccer Game Understandingcited by 8
  8. 2023Survey of Action Recognition, Spotting and Spatio-Temporal Localization in Soccer -- Current Trends and Research Perspectivescited by 7
  9. 2024Deep learning for action spotting in association football videoscited by 7
  10. 2022P2ANet: A Dataset and Benchmark for Dense Action Detection from Table Tennis Match Broadcasting Videoscited by 5
  11. 2024Spatio-temporal Prompting Network for Robust Video Feature Extractioncited by 5
  12. 2025Gate-Shift-Pose: Enhancing Action Recognition in Sports with Skeleton Informationcited by 4
15 more
  1. 2023Video4MRI: An Empirical Study on Brain Magnetic Resonance Image Analytics with CNN-based Video Classification Frameworkscited by 2
  2. 2024OSL-ActionSpotting: A Unified Library for Action Spotting in Sports Videoscited by 2
  3. 2025SoccerSynth-Detection: A Synthetic Dataset for Soccer Player Detectioncited by 2
  4. 2026SportSkills: Physical Skill Learning from Sports Instructional Videoscited by 1
  5. 2026ViTs for Action Classification in Videos: An Approach to Risky Tackle Detection in American Football Practice Videoscited by 1
  6. 2023Challenges in Video-Based Infant Action Recognition: A Critical Examination of the State of the Artcited by 0
  7. 2024A Simple and Effective Temporal Grounding Pipeline for Basketball Broadcast Footagecited by 0
  8. 2024Future Aspects in Human Action Recognition: Exploring Emerging Techniques and Ethical Influencescited by 0
  9. 2025HFGCN:Hypergraph Fusion Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognitioncited by 0
  10. 2025TrajSV: A Trajectory-based Model for Sports Video Representations and Applicationscited by 0
  11. 2025Sparse Transformer for Ultra-sparse Sampled Video Compressive Sensingcited by 0
  12. 2025VICTOR: Dataset Copyright Auditing in Video Recognition Systemscited by 0
  13. 2026Multi-Camera Self-Calibration in Sports Motion Capture: Leveraging Human and Stick Posescited by 0
  14. 2026Identifying Ethical Biases in Action Recognition Modelscited by 0
  15. 2026Cross-view Multimodal Vision-Based Assessment Framework for Traditional Chinese Medicine Rehabilitation Trainingcited by 0