Umpire’s Signal Recognition in Cricket Using an Attention based DC-GRU Network

Computer vision has extensive applications in various sports domains, and cricket, a complex game with different event types, is no exception. Recognizing umpire signals during cricket matches is essential for fair and accurate decision-making in gameplay. This paper presents the Cricket Umpire Action Video dataset (CUAVd), a novel dataset designed for detecting umpire postures in cricket matches. As the umpire possesses the power to make crucial judgments concerning incidents that occur on the field, this dataset aims to contribute to the advancement of automated systems for umpire recognition in cricket. The proposed Attention-based Deep Convolutional GRU Network accurately detects and classifies various umpire signal actions in video sequences. The method achieved remarkable results on our prepared CUAVd dataset and publicly available datasets, namely HMDB51, Youtube Actions, and UCF101. The DC-GRU Attention model demonstrated its effectiveness in capturing temporal dependencies and accurately recognizing umpire signal actions. Compared to other advanced models like traditional CNN architectures, CNN-LSTM with Attention, and the 3DCNN+GRU model, the proposed model consistently outperformed them in recognizing umpire signal actions. It achieved a high validation accuracy of 94.38% in classifying umpire signal videos correctly. The paper also evaluated the models using performance metrics like F1-Measure and Confusion Matrix, confirming their effectiveness in recognizing umpire signal actions. The suggested model has practical applications in real-life situations such as sports analysis, referee training, and automated referee assistance systems where precise identification of umpire signals in videos is vital.