Gait-Based Prediction of Penalty Kick Direction in Soccer

David Freire-Obregón, Oliverio Santana, Javier Lorenzo-Navarro, Daniel Hernández-Sosa, Modesto Castrillón-Santana

2025

Abstract

Understanding and predicting penalty kick outcomes is critical in performance analysis and strategic decision-making in soccer. This study investigates the potential of gait-based biometrics to classify the intended shoot zone of penalty takers using temporal gait embeddings extracted from multiple state-of-the-art gait recognition backbones. We compile a comprehensive evaluation across several models and datasets, including baseline models and other models such as GaitPart, GLN, GaitSet, and GaitGL trained on OUMVLP, CASIA-B, and GREW. A standardized LSTM-based classifier is trained to predict the shooting zone from video-level gait sequences, using consistent train-test splits to ensure fair comparisons. While performance varies across model-dataset pairs, we observe that certain combinations yield better predictive accuracy, suggesting that the gait representation and the training data influence downstream task performance to some degree. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using gait as a predictive cue in sports analytics. It offers a structured benchmark for evaluating gait embeddings in the context of penalty shoot zone prediction.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Freire-Obregón D., Santana O., Lorenzo-Navarro J., Hernández-Sosa D. and Castrillón-Santana M. (2025). Gait-Based Prediction of Penalty Kick Direction in Soccer. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support - Volume 1: icSPORTS; ISBN 978-989-758-771-9, SciTePress, pages 142-149. DOI: 10.5220/0013669900003988

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsports25,
author={David Freire-Obregón and Oliverio Santana and Javier Lorenzo-Navarro and Daniel Hernández-Sosa and Modesto Castrillón-Santana},
title={Gait-Based Prediction of Penalty Kick Direction in Soccer},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support - Volume 1: icSPORTS},
year={2025},
pages={142-149},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013669900003988},
isbn={978-989-758-771-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support - Volume 1: icSPORTS
TI - Gait-Based Prediction of Penalty Kick Direction in Soccer
SN - 978-989-758-771-9
AU - Freire-Obregón D.
AU - Santana O.
AU - Lorenzo-Navarro J.
AU - Hernández-Sosa D.
AU - Castrillón-Santana M.
PY - 2025
SP - 142
EP - 149
DO - 10.5220/0013669900003988
PB - SciTePress