Journal of Applied Science and Engineering

Published by Tamkang University Press

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Neural tensor network and adaptive graph convolution for sports action recognition

 2026

 Volume 29, Issue 6

Lin Teng, Hang Li, and Yuchang Si

College of Artificial Intelligence, Shenyang Normal University, Shenyang 110034, 7 China

Received: June 14, 2025
Accepted: October 6, 2025
Publication Date: April 2, 2026

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The overall structural framework of the proposed model

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Current human bone action recognition algorithms have some problems such as insufficiently detailed description of the global relationship and insufficient mining of spatio-temporal features. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel sports action recognition based on neural tensor network and adaptive graph convolution. Firstly, the attention mechanism and neural tensor network (NTN) algorithm are used to solve the connection strength between each pair of joint nodes and construct the global adjacency matrix. Secondly, by using the topK strategy, the topK neighbor nodes are dynamically selected based on the connection strength to update the global adjacency matrix. Thirdly, the hybrid pooling model is adopted to extract the global context information and the temporal key frame features. By simultaneously modeling joint information, bone information, joint movement information and bone movement information, the representation ability of the features extracted by the model for movements is strengthened. The experimental results on the Something-Something V1&V2 and Kinetics-400 datasets show that the proposed model in this paper outperforms most other advanced action recognition methods, proving that this new model can effectively improve the performance of action recognition.

Keywords: sports action recognition, neural tensor network, adaptive graph convolution, topK strategy, hybrid pooling model

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