Abstract
Featured Application: This research describes a methodology for identifying the moment when a goalkeeper initiates their save attempt in the frontal plane, providing a way to benchmark the timing component of a save attempt. This study explores how open-source pose estimation can be utilized to identify goalkeeper dive initiation during soccer penalty kicks. The purpose of this study is to provide an accessible, low-cost heuristic methodology for identifying goalkeeper dive initiation. This study uses single-camera broadcast footage (1080 p resolution, 50 frames per second) of all 41 penalty shootout kicks attempted during the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup. We isolated each penalty kick and recorded the frames of goalkeeper dive initiation and flight. We then identified goalposts to create a homography matrix to account for camera movement and identified the goalkeeper’s skeletal keypoints through pose estimation. From these keypoints, we derived frontal plane kinematics for the torso and legs. We identified local extrema for each kinematic variable and isolated the last observed extrema prior to goalkeeper flight for each variable. Using OLS regression, we found that the last local extremum of the goalkeeper centroid’s y-value was the strongest predictor of labeled commitment to the dive side, with an R2 of 0.998 and a p-value of 0.00. The results of this research are preliminary but demonstrate the promise of pose estimation in identifying sport-specific action timing during live game play using a single camera.
Description
Copyright: © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
Publisher
MDPI
Date of publication
7-2024
Language
english
Persistent identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4952
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Chethan, Reddy and Jeon, Woohyoung, "Identifying Goalkeeper Movement Timing from Single-Camera Broadcast Footage through Pose Estimation: A Pilot Study" (2024). Health & Kinesiology Faculty Publications and Presentations. Paper 46.
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4952