Robotics Perception: Intention Recognition to Determine the Handball Occurrence during a Football or Soccer Match

In football or soccer, a referee controls the game based on the set rules. The decisions made by the referee are final and can’t be appealed. Some of the decisions, especially after a handball event, whether to award a penalty kick or a yellow/red card can greatly affect the final results of a game. It is therefore necessary that the referee does not make an error. The objective is therefore to create a system that can accurately recognize such events and make the correct decision. This study chose handball, an event that occurs in a football game (Not to be confused with the game of Handball). We define a handball event using object detection and robotic perception and decide whether it is intentional or not. Intention recognition is a robotic perception of emotion recognition. To define handball, we trained a model to detect the hand and ball which are primary objects. We then determined the intention using gaze recognition and finally combined the results to recognize a handball event. On our dataset, the results of the hand and the ball object detection were 96% and 100% respectively. With the gaze recognition at 100%, if all objects were recognized, then the intention and handball event recognition were at 100%.