Football Shot Detection using Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: In this thesis, three different neural network architectures are investigated to detect the action of a shot within a football game using video data. The first architecture uses con- ventional convolution and pooling layers as feature extraction. It acts as a baseline and gives insight into the challenges faced during shot detection. The second architecture uses a pre-trained feature extractor. The last architecture uses three-dimensional convolution. All these networks are trained using short video clips extracted from football game video streams. Apart from investigating network architectures, different sampling methods are evaluated as well. This thesis shows that amongst the three evaluated methods, the ap- proach using MobileNetV2 as a feature extractor works best. However, when applying the networks to a video stream there are a multitude of challenges, such as false positives and incorrect annotations that inhibit the potential of detecting shots.