Volleyball video analysis plays important roles in providing data for TV contents and developing strategies. Among all the topics of volleyball analysis, qualitative player action recognition is essential because it potentially provides not only the action that being performed but also the quality, which means how well the action is performed. However, most action recognition researches focus on the discrimination between different actions. The quality of an action, which is helpful for evaluation and training of the player skill, has only received little attention so far. The vital problems in qualitative action recognition include occlusion, small inter-class difference and various kinds of appearance caused by the player change. This paper proposes a 3D global and multi-view local features combination based recognition framework with global team formation feature, ball state feature and abrupt pose features. The above problems are solved by the combination of 3D global features (which hide the unstable and incomplete 2D motion feature caused by occlusion) and the multi-view local features (which get detailed local motion features of body parts in multiple viewpoints). Firstly, the team formation extracts the 3D trajectories from the whole team members rather than a single target player. This proposal focuses more on the entire feature while eliminating the personal effect. Secondly, the ball motion state feature extracts features from the 3D ball trajectory. The ball motion is not affected by the personal appearance, so this proposal ignores the influence of the players appearance and makes it more robust to target player change. At last, the abrupt pose feature consists of two parts: the abrupt hit frame pose (which extracts the contour shape of the player's pose at the hit time) and abrupt pose variation (which extracts the pose variation between the preparation pose and ending pose during the action). These two features make difference of each action quality more distinguishable by focusing on the motion standard and stability between different quality actions. Experiments are conducted on game videos from the Semifinal and Final Game of 2014 Japan Inter High School Games of Men's Volleyball in Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. The experimental results show the accuracy achieves 97.26%, improving 11.33% for action discrimination and 91.76%, and improving 13.72% for action quality evaluation.

Automatic game strategy data acquisition is important for the realization of the professional strategy analysis systems by providing evaluation values such as the team status and the efficacy of plays. The key factor that influences the performance of the strategy data acquisition in volleyball game is the unknown player roles. Player role means the position with game meaning of each player in the team formation, such as the setter, attacker and blocker. The unknown player role makes individual player unreliable and loses the contribution of each player in the strategy analysis. This paper proposes a court-divisional team motion feature and a player performance curve to deal with the unknown player roles in strategy data acquisition. Firstly, the court-divisional team motion feature is proposed for the team tactical status detection. This feature reduces the influence of individual player information by summing up the ball relative motion density of all the players in divided court area, which corresponds to the different plays. Secondly, the player performance curves are proposed for the efficacy variables acquisition in attack play. The player roles candidates are detected by three features that represent the entire process of a player starting to rush (or jump) to the ball and hit the ball: the ball relative distance, ball approach motion and the attack motion feature. With the 3D ball trajectories and multiple players' positions tracked from multi-view volleyball game videos, the experimental detection rate of each team status (attack, defense-ready, offense-ready and offense status) are 75.2%, 84.2%, 79.7% and 81.6%. And for the attack efficacy variables acquisition, the average precision of the set zone, the number of available attackers, the attack tempo and the number of blockers are 100%, 100%, 97.8%, and 100%, which achieve 8.3% average improvement compared with manual acquisition.

The ball state tracking and detection technology plays a significant role in volleyball game analysis, whose performance is limited due to the challenges include: 1) the inaccurate ball trajectory; 2) multiple numbers of the ball event category; 3) the large intra-class difference of one event. With the goal of broadcasting supporting for volleyball games which requires a real time system, this paper proposes a ball state based parallel ball tracking and event detection method based on a sequential estimation method such as particle filter. This method employs a parallel process of the 3D ball tracking and the event detection so that it is friendly for real time system implementation. The 3D ball tracking process uses the same models with the past work [8]. For event detection process, a ball event change estimation based multiple system model, a past trajectory referred hit point likelihood and a court-line distance feature based event type detection are proposed. First, the multiple system model transits the ball event state, which consists the event starting time and the event type, through three models dealing with different ball motion situations in the volleyball game, such as the motion keeping and changing. The mixture of these models is decided by estimation of the ball event change estimation. Secondly, the past trajectory referred hit point likelihood avoids the processing time delay between the ball tracking and the event detection process by evaluating the probability of the ball being hit at certain time without using future ball trajectories. Third, the feature of the distance between the ball and the specific court line are extracted to detect the ball event type. Experimental results based on multi-view HDTV video sequences (2014 Inter High School Men's Volleyball Games, Japan), which contains 606 events in total, show that the detection rate reaches 88.61% while the success rate of 3D ball tracking keeps more than 99%.