Activity recognition in sport is an attractive field for computer vision
research. Game, player and team analysis are of great interest and research
topics within this field emerge with the goal of automated analysis. The very
specific underlying rules of sports can be used as prior knowledge for the
recognition task and present a constrained environment for evaluation. This
paper describes recognition of single player activities in sport with special
emphasis on volleyball. Starting from a per-frame player-centered activity
recognition, we incorporate geometry and contextual information via an activity
context descriptor that collects information about all player's activities over
a certain timespan relative to the investigated player. The benefit of this
context information on single player activity recognition is evaluated on our
new real-life dataset presenting a total amount of almost 36k annotated frames
containing 7 activity classes within 6 videos of professional volleyball games.
Our incorporation of the contextual information improves the average
player-centered classification performance of 77.56% by up to 18.35% on
specific classes, proving that spatio-temporal context is an important clue for
activity recognition.Comment: Part of the OAGM 2014 proceedings (arXiv:1404.3538