# Survey of Action Recognition, Spotting and Spatio-Temporal Localization in Soccer -- Current Trends and Research Perspectives

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12067 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12067/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 77 of its 177 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [X-VARS: Introducing Explainability in Football Refereeing with Multi-Modal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06332/) (2024)
- [Action Anticipation from SoccerNet Football Video Broadcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12021/) (2025)
- [Investigating Event-Based Cameras for Video Frame Interpolation in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02370/) (2024)
- [Towards Athlete Fatigue Assessment from Association Football Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05636/) (2026)
- [SoccerNet 2026 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07320/) (2026)
- [PLayerTV: Advanced Player Tracking and Identification for Automatic Soccer Highlight Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16076/) (2024)
- [UTAL-GNN: Unsupervised Temporal Action Localization using Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19647/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Action scene understanding in soccer is a challenging task due to the complex and dynamic nature of the game, as well as the interactions between players. This article provides a comprehensive overview of this task divided into action recognition, spotting, and spatio-temporal action localization, with a particular emphasis on the modalities used and multimodal methods. We explore the publicly available data sources and metrics used to evaluate models' performance. The article reviews recent state-of-the-art methods that leverage deep learning techniques and traditional methods. We focus on multimodal methods, which integrate information from multiple sources, such as video and audio data, and also those that represent one source in various ways. The advantages and limitations of methods are discussed, along with their potential for improving the accuracy and robustness of models. Finally, the article highlights some of the open research questions and future directions in the field of soccer action recognition, including the potential for multimodal methods to advance this field. Overall, this survey provides a valuable resource for researchers interested in the field of action scene understanding in soccer.