A Spatiotemporal Graph Transformer Network for real-time ball trajectory monitoring and prediction in dynamic sports environments

Ball trajectory prediction in sports is a crucial task for real-time applications such as performance analytics and coaching systems. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously capture the spatial relationships between players and the ball while modeling long-term temporal dependencies. To ad...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zujian Li, Dan Yu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2025-04-01
Series:Alexandria Engineering Journal
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Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110016824015242
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Summary:Ball trajectory prediction in sports is a crucial task for real-time applications such as performance analytics and coaching systems. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously capture the spatial relationships between players and the ball while modeling long-term temporal dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose the Spatiotemporal Graph Transformer Network (SGTN), which integrates a Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) with a Transformer architecture. This combination allows for precise modeling of dynamic sports scenarios by effectively handling both spatial and temporal data. Experimental results on the SoccerNet-v2 dataset demonstrate that SGTN significantly outperforms recent models in terms of prediction accuracy, trajectory coverage, and robustness, while maintaining competitive inference times suitable for real-time applications. SGTN achieves a significant 25% reduction in prediction error compared to existing models. This improvement underscores its enhanced accuracy, robustness, and real-time feasibility, making it highly suitable for applications such as live sports analysis, performance monitoring, and decision-making. The model’s ability to generalize across multi-scenario environments further demonstrates its potential applicability to other fields beyond sports, including autonomous systems and robotics. Our future work aims to enhance memory efficiency and optimize multi-scenario inference speed to broaden the model’s deployment in edge computing environments.
ISSN:1110-0168