CAS-FD: Contact-Aware Temporal Sampling for Single-View Foul vs Dive Recognition

Distinguishing a genuine foul from a simulated dive in football remains one of the sport's most contested fine-grained recognition problems, especially when such decisions have to be from a single broadcast view without multi-view camera angle. We introduce a balanced 600-clip single-view Foul/Dive dataset and show that contact-aware sampling concentrating the model's attention around the moment of physical contact rather than treating all frames equally yields substantially improved recognition of this contact- specific problem. The proposed approach achieves 86.0% accuracy and macro-F1 0.860 on the held-out test split, a 12 percentage- point gain over contact-unaware alternatives that grows further on unseen data. We also evaluate each pipeline component against human annotations, establishing where and why the system suc- ceeds and fails. The result is a documented dataset, a reproducible single-view pipeline, and a grounded evaluation framework for fine-grained contact-event recognition in broadcast football footage. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/hossain- tamim/contact-aware-dive.