# Deep Learning for Sports Video Event Detection: Tasks, Datasets, Methods, and Challenges

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03991 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03991/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (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)
- [BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09702/) (2019)
- [Video Classification with Channel-Separated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02811/) (2019)
- [Video Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00719/) (2021)
- [BSN: Boundary Sensitive Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02964/) (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)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Features with 3D Residual Networks for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07632/) (2017)
- [SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04527/) (2018)
- [TriDet: Temporal Action Detection with Relative Boundary Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07347/) (2023)
- [SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13367/) (2020)
- [TURN TAP: Temporal Unit Regression Network for Temporal Action Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06189/) (2017)
- [Temporal Context Aggregation Network for Temporal Action Proposal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13141/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Detecting Precise Hand Touch Moments in Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12343/) (2026)
- [Do We Need Large VLMs for Spotting Soccer Actions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17144/) (2025)
- [MS-RFD: Multi-Signal Release Frame Detection in Hammer Throw from Reconstructed 3D Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18260/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video event detection has become a cornerstone of modern sports analytics, powering automated performance evaluation, content generation, and tactical decision-making. Recent advances in deep learning have driven progress in related tasks such as Temporal Action Localization (TAL), which detects extended action segments; Action Spotting (AS), which identifies a representative timestamp; and Precise Event Spotting (PES), which pinpoints the exact frame of an event. Although closely connected, their subtle differences often blur the boundaries between them, leading to confusion in both research and practical applications. Furthermore, prior surveys either address generic video event detection or broader sports video tasks, but largely overlook the unique temporal granularity and domain-specific challenges of event spotting. In addition, most existing sports video surveys focus on elite-level competitions while neglecting the wider community of everyday practitioners. This survey addresses these gaps by: (i) clearly delineating TAL, AS, and PES and their respective use cases; (ii) introducing a structured taxonomy of state of the art approaches including temporal modeling strategies, multimodal frameworks, and data-efficient pipelines tailored for AS and PES; and (iii) critically assessing benchmark datasets and evaluation protocols, highlighting limitations such as reliance on broadcast quality footage and metrics that over reward permissive multilabel predictions. By synthesizing current research and exposing open challenges, this work provides a comprehensive foundation for developing temporally precise, generalizable, and practically deployable sports event detection systems for both the research and industry communities.