See It Before You Grab It: Deep Learning-based Action Anticipation in Basketball

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning approach for action anticipation in basketball, focusing on predicting team possession after shot attempts, supported by a large new dataset and baseline evaluations.

Contribution

It presents the first deep learning-based method for basketball rebound prediction, along with a comprehensive dataset and analysis of action anticipation challenges.

Findings

Feasibility of rebound anticipation demonstrated

Baseline methods achieve promising results

Dataset supports diverse basketball video understanding tasks

Abstract

Computer vision and video understanding have transformed sports analytics by enabling large-scale, automated analysis of game dynamics from broadcast footage. Despite significant advances in player and ball tracking, pose estimation, action localization, and automatic foul recognition, anticipating actions before they occur in sports videos has received comparatively little attention. This work introduces the task of action anticipation in basketball broadcast videos, focusing on predicting which team will gain possession of the ball following a shot attempt. To benchmark this task, a new self-curated dataset comprising 100,000 basketball video clips, over 300 hours of footage, and more than 2,000 manually annotated rebound events is presented. Comprehensive baseline results are reported using state-of-the-art action anticipation methods, representing the first application of deep learning techniques to basketball rebound prediction. Additionally, two complementary tasks, rebound classification and rebound spotting, are explored, demonstrating that this dataset supports a wide range of video understanding applications in basketball, for which no comparable datasets currently exist. Experimental results highlight both the feasibility and inherent challenges of anticipating rebounds, providing valuable insights into predictive modeling for dynamic multi-agent sports scenarios. By forecasting team possession before rebounds occur, this work enables applications in real-time automated broadcasting and post-game analysis tools to support decision-making.