FineSports: A Multi-person Hierarchical Sports Video Dataset for Fine-grained Action Understanding

Fine-grained action analysis in multi-person sports is complex due to athletes' quick movements and intense physical confrontations which result in severe visual obstructions in most scenes. In addition accessible multi-person sports video datasets lack fine-grained action annotations in both space and time adding to the difficulty in fine-grained action analysis. To this end we construct a new multi-person basketball sports video dataset named FineSports which contains fine-grained semantic and spatial-temporal annotations on 10000 NBA game videos covering 52 fine-grained action types 16000 action instances and 123000 spatial-temporal bounding boxes. We also propose a new prompt-driven spatial-temporal action location approach called PoSTAL composed of a prompt-driven target action encoder (PTA) and an action tube-specific detector (ATD) to directly generate target action tubes with fine-grained action types without any off-line proposal generation. Extensive experiments on the FineSports dataset demonstrate that PoSTAL outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Data and code are available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/FineSports_CVPR2024.