Catch Recognition in Automated American Football Training Using Machine Learning

In order to train receivers in American football in a targeted and individual manner, the strengths and weaknesses of the athletes must be evaluated precisely. As human resources are limited, it is beneficial to do it in an automated way. Automated passing machines are already given, therefore the motivation is to design a computer-based system that records and automatically evaluates the athlete's catch attempts. The most fundamental evaluation would be whether the athlete has caught the pass successfully or not. An experiment was carried out to gain data about catch attempts that potentially contain information about the outcome of such. The experiment used a fully automated passing machine which can release passes on command. After a pass was released, an audio and a video sequence of the specific catch attempt was recorded. For this purpose, an audio-visual recording system was developed which was integrated into the passing machine. This system is used to create an audio and video dataset in the amount of 2276 recorded catch attempts. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used for feature extraction with downstream Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to classify the video data. Classification of the audio data is performed using a one-dimensional CNN. With the chosen neural network architecture, an accuracy of 92.19% was achieved in detecting whether a pass had been caught or not. The feasibility for automatic classification of catch attempts during automated catch training is confirmed with this result.