An AI Approach to Pose-based Sports Activity Classification

Artificial intelligence systems have permeated into all spheres of our life-impacting everything from our food habits to our sleep patterns. One untouched area where such intelligent systems are still in their infancy is sports. There has not been enough indulgence of AI techniques in sports, and most of the works are carried on manually by coaching staff and human appointees. We believe that intelligent systems can make coaching staff’s work easier and produce findings that the human eye can often overlook. Here, we have proposed an intelligent system to analyze the beautiful game of tennis. With the use of computer vision architecture Detectron2 and activity-based pose estimation and subsequent classification, it can identify an action from a tennis shot (activity). It can produce a performance score for the player based on pose and movement like forehand and backhand. It can also be used to understand and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the player. The proposed approach provides a piece of valuable information for a player’s performance and activity detection to be used for better coaching. The study achieves a classification accuracy of 98.60% and outperforms other SOTA CNN models.