The Application of Object Detection in Sports

Dylan Runjia Li

2025

Abstract

Object detection, which aims to both detect where multiple objects are in an image and classify them, is a significant task in computer vision and graphics due to its broad applications in robotics, autonomous driving, and sports analytics. In sports, it is increasingly used to track player movements and develop strategies for team-based games. Despite the fast development of object detection, a comprehensive study of its application in sports remains lacking. To address this, this paper analyzes state-of-the-art methods such as YOLO, SSD, RetinaNet, and R-CNN variants, highlighting their strengths and limitations and improvements over previous methods. Furthermore, the application of these methods in sports such as soccer, basketball, and baseball are introduced along with the many challenges of implementing object detection in sports such as occlusion and fast motion. These applications that have been developed with object detection solve a variety of issues in these sports, mostly dealing with the collection of different types of sports data. Advancements like these can greatly increase the accessibility of sports data by reducing the cost required to collect it, opening up its many use cases such as aid in coaching and strategy to a wider audience beyond major professional leagues.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Li D. (2025). The Application of Object Detection in Sports. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Data Science and Engineering - Volume 1: ICDSE; ISBN 978-989-758-765-8, SciTePress, pages 72-76. DOI: 10.5220/0013678300004670

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icdse25,
author={Dylan Runjia Li},
title={The Application of Object Detection in Sports},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Data Science and Engineering - Volume 1: ICDSE},
year={2025},
pages={72-76},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013678300004670},
isbn={978-989-758-765-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Data Science and Engineering - Volume 1: ICDSE
TI - The Application of Object Detection in Sports
SN - 978-989-758-765-8
AU - Li D.
PY - 2025
SP - 72
EP - 76
DO - 10.5220/0013678300004670
PB - SciTePress