A new vision-based approach was presented for predicting the behavior of the ball carrier—shooting, passing and dribbling in basketball matches. It was proposed to recognize the ball carrier’s head pose by classifying its yaw angle to determine his vision range and the court situation of the sportsman within his vision range can be further learned. In basketball match videos characterized by cluttered background, fast motion of the sportsmen and low resolution of their head images, and the covariance descriptor, were adopted to fuse multiple visual features of the head region, which can be seen as a point on the Riemannian manifold and then mapped to the tangent space. Then, the classification of head yaw angle was directly completed in this space through the trained multiclass LogitBoost. In order to describe the court situation of all sportsmen within the ball carrier’s vision range, artificial potential field (APF)-based information was introduced. Finally, the behavior of the ball carrier—shooting, passing and dribbling, was predicted using radial basis function (RBF) neural network as the classifier. Experimental results show that the average prediction accuracy of the proposed method can reach 80% on the video recorded in basketball matches, which validates its effectiveness.
