# A Graph-Based Method for Soccer Action Spotting Using Unsupervised Player Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12334 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12334/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04527/) (2018)
- [SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13367/) (2020)
- [DeepGCNs: Making GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06849/) (2019)
- [A Context-Aware Loss Function for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01326/) (2019)
- [Camera Calibration and Player Localization in SoccerNet-v2 and Investigation of their Representations for Action Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09333/) (2021)
- [Temporally-Aware Feature Pooling for Action Spotting in Soccer Broadcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06779/) (2021)
- [Feature Combination Meets Attention: Baidu Soccer Embeddings and Transformer based Temporal Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14447/) (2021)
- [Improved Soccer Action Spotting using both Audio and Video Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04258/) (2020)
- [RMS-Net: Regression and Masking for Soccer Event Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07624/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning for Sports Video: Unsupervised Player Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10068/) (2021)
- [Always Look on the Bright Side of the Field: Merging Pose and Contextual Data to Estimate Orientation of Soccer Players](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00943/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [SoccerNet-Caption: Dense Video Captioning for Soccer Broadcasts Commentaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04565/) (2023)
- [VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04617/) (2023)
- [Towards Active Learning for Action Spotting in Association Football Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04220/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning in Sports Applications: Perception, Comprehension, and Decision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03353/) (2023)
- [Survey of Action Recognition, Spotting and Spatio-Temporal Localization in Soccer -- Current Trends and Research Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12067/) (2023)
- [Game State and Spatio-temporal Action Detection in Soccer using Graph Neural Networks and 3D Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15462/) (2025)
- [FOOTPASS: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Tactical Context Dataset for Play-by-Play Action Spotting in Soccer Broadcast Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16183/) (2025)
- [SoccerHigh: A Benchmark Dataset for Automatic Soccer Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01439/) (2025)
- [OSL-ActionSpotting: A Unified Library for Action Spotting in Sports Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01265/) (2024)
- [Pixels or Positions? Benchmarking Modalities in Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12606/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Action spotting in soccer videos is the task of identifying the specific time when a certain key action of the game occurs. Lately, it has received a large amount of attention and powerful methods have been introduced. Action spotting involves understanding the dynamics of the game, the complexity of events, and the variation of video sequences. Most approaches have focused on the latter, given that their models exploit the global visual features of the sequences. In this work, we focus on the former by (a) identifying and representing the players, referees, and goalkeepers as nodes in a graph, and by (b) modeling their temporal interactions as sequences of graphs. For the player identification, or player classification task, we obtain an accuracy of 97.72% in our annotated benchmark. For the action spotting task, our method obtains an overall performance of 57.83% average-mAP by combining it with other audiovisual modalities. This performance surpasses similar graph-based methods and has competitive results with heavy computing methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/IPCV/soccer_action_spotting.