Enhancing soccer pass receiver prediction in broadcast images through advanced deep learning techniques: A comprehensive study on model optimization and performance evaluation

Abstract

In this study, we present a graph neural network (GNN) model specifically designed for football pass receiver prediction in Broadcast Images is presented in this study. Important node properties, including ball possession indicators, hot-encoded team values, and normalized ground placements, are incorporated into the model along with a careful weighting of edges to account for player distances. With weighted BCE loss used to overcome class imbalance, its architecture consists of a linear layer, numerous GNN Message Passing layers, a SoftMax activation, and binary cross-entropy (BCE) loss for training. Of 206 examples, 101 valid predictions were made, indicating a predictive accuracy of 0.50 according to the evaluation data. Comparative analyzes show that GAT-V2 (0.85) and GAT (0.63) perform better in terms of optimization and accuracy, respectively. The effectiveness in recognizing football pass receivers is demonstrated in this paper, highlighting developments in computer vision applications for sports analytics.