Robust Sports Image Classification Using InceptionV3 and Neural Networks

In today’s world of internet, a massive amount of data is getting generated every day and content-based classification of images is becoming an essential aspect for efficient retrieval of images and have attracted application in several fields and one of such field is sports. Sport is an integral part of everybody’s daily life and it is very important to play the sport with the right posture and environment otherwise it can lead to medical issues. This paper presents a robust framework for classifying the sport images based on the environment and related surroundings. In this paper, our approach is based on the use of the Inception V3 for the extraction of features and Neural Networks for the classification of various sport categories. Six categories rugby, tennis, cricket, basketball, volleyball, and badminton have been used for analysis and classification. To validate the effectiveness of the framework and Neural Networks, comparisons have been done with other classifiers like Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Our framework has successfully achieved an average accuracy of 96.64 % over six categories which demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework and can be used for the detection and classification of various sport activities in an efficient manner.