Papers for

sports performance analysts

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Transformer combines multiple camera views for better 3D human pose estimates

STA-TFM: Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Across Views TransForMer for Pose Estimation

Abstract: Monocular 3D human pose estimation (HPE) remains challenging due to depth ambiguity, occlu- sions, and the need for temporal consistency. While multi-view methods provide superior accuracy over monocular approaches, they often require complex setups. We introduce STA-TFM, a transformer-based architecture that combines spatial and temporal information for multi-view pose estimation. The approach leverages DSTformer, a monocular feature extractor, to capture long-range pose dependencies within each view. A fusion transformer then aggregates information across views to produce coherent 3D estimates. To address training data scarcity, we use a data generation pipeline that transforms any existing 3D pose dataset into multi-view setups with controllable parameters. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that STA-TFM outperforms existing camera-parameter-free multi-view methods. STA-TFM achieves 50.9% and 49.5% reductions in mean per joint position error (MPJPE) and mean per joint velocity error (MPJVE) on the DHP19 dataset. Furthermore, it achieves 6.7% and 7.7% respective reductions on HAA4D, and a 15.2% MPJPE reduction on TotalCapture. STA-TFM handles noisy and missing 2D inputs, supporting potential deployment in healthcare monitoring, athletic assessment, and immersive technologies. Code, training checkpoints, and data are available at https://zenodo.org/records/22832620.

Mon 21 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Estimating 3D human poses from a single camera is hard because the camera can only see from one angle, making it tricky to understand depth and handle blocked views. The authors created a new method called STA-TFM that uses a transformer model to combine information over time from several cameras to make more accurate 3D pose estimates. They also developed a way to create training data with different camera setups to help the model learn. Their method works better than other approaches that don’t rely on camera settings and handles missing or noisy input well.
Open 2609.24482v1

Self supervised video synthesis boosts repetitive action counting accuracy

TReViS: Temporal Repetition Structure Aware Video Synthesis for Self-supervised Repetitive Action Counting

Abstract: Fully supervised repetitive action counting (RAC) has achieved strong performance, but requires dense temporal annotations that are costly and difficult to scale. We propose TReViS, a self-supervised video synthesis framework that enables training RAC models without any repetition labels. TReViS estimates the underlying temporal repetition structure of an unlabeled video via a Temporal Self-Similarity Matrix, infers its cycle statistics, and synthesizes new training sequences that preserve realistic repetition patterns while introducing controlled temporal variability. These synthesized videos are paired with pseudo-labels and used to train existing RAC architectures from scratch. Across multiple datasets and backbones, TReViS consistently outperforms prior self-supervised methods and achieves performance competitive with several supervised baselines, while remaining fully label-free, demonstrating the effectiveness of structure-aware video synthesis for label-free RAC. The source code is available at https://github.com/yfqi/TReViS.

Mon 21 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Counting repeated actions in videos usually needs lots of time-consuming labels. The authors propose TReViS, a method that learns from unlabeled videos by finding patterns of repetitions and creating new training videos with similar cycles. This lets existing counting models train without labeled examples. Their approach performs better than other label-free methods and nearly matches models trained with labels.
Open 2609.24367v1

Multi signal method detects hammer throw release frames automatically

MS-RFD: Multi-Signal Release Frame Detection in Hammer Throw from Reconstructed 3D Trajectories

Abstract: Recent advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision are reshaping sports performance analysis by enabling automated detection, tracking, and performance analysis. In hammer throw, performance is strongly determined by the kinematic conditions at release, particularly release speed, release angle, and release height. However, identifying the release instant from video typically requires manual frame-by-frame inspection, which is subjective and cumbersome in real-world training scenarios. In this paper, we present a fully automatic multi-signal release frame detection (MS-RFD) method for hammer throw using reconstructed 3D hammer trajectories. The proposed method integrates four complementary kinematic signals: speed dynamics, angular velocity transition, radial distance relative to the rotation center, and post-release trajectory linearity. These signals are fused to score and verify candidate release frames. MS-RFD is evaluated through the throwing-distance estimation error obtained from the release parameters estimated at the detected frame. An ablation study analyzes the contribution of each signal and compares alternative candidate selection strategies. The results show that speed dynamics and radial expansion provide the strongest signals for release frame detection, while angular velocity and post-release linearity provide smaller refinements.

Wed 16 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Determining the exact moment a hammer is released in hammer throw is important but usually requires careful and slow manual video review. The authors developed a computer method that uses four different movement clues from 3D reconstructed hammer paths to automatically find the release frame. This approach combines speed patterns, turning speed changes, distance from the center, and straightness of the hammer’s flight after release. Their tests showed that speed and distance clues were most helpful, with the other signals giving smaller improvements.
Open 2609.18260v1