# Event Detection in Football using Graph Convolutional Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10052 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10052/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

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- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
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- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13478/) (2021)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
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- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00982/) (2020)
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- [Geometric deep learning on graphs and manifolds using mixture model CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08402/) (2016)
- [Residual Gated Graph ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07553/) (2017)
- [Omni-Scale Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00953/) (2019)
- [CayleyNets: Graph Convolutional Neural Networks with Complex Rational Spectral Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07664/) (2017)
- [SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04527/) (2018)
- [Encoding Sentences with Graph Convolutional Networks for Semantic Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04826/) (2017)
- [SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13367/) (2020)
- [Fake News Detection on Social Media using Geometric Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06673/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The massive growth of data collection in sports has opened numerous avenues for professional teams and media houses to gain insights from this data. The data collected includes per frame player and ball trajectories, and event annotations such as passes, fouls, cards, goals, etc. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently been employed to process this highly unstructured tracking data which can be otherwise difficult to model because of lack of clarity on how to order players in a sequence and how to handle missing objects of interest. In this thesis, we focus on the goal of automatic event detection from football videos. We show how to model the players and the ball in each frame of the video sequence as a graph, and present the results for graph convolutional layers and pooling methods that can be used to model the temporal context present around each action.
