SoccerDETR: Real-Time Soccer Object Detection via Visual State Space Models with Semantic-Aware Feature Fusion

Real-time object detection in soccer videos presents significant challenges due to the dynamic nature of matches, varying object scales, and the stringent requirement for efficient processing. In this work, we define real-time detection as that which achieves inference speeds of at least 30 frames per second (FPS), which is the minimum requirement for smooth video processing and live broadcast applications. While transformer-based detectors have achieved remarkable accuracy, their quadratic computational complexity limits their real-time applications. In this paper, we propose SoccerDETR, a novel real-time detection framework that integrates MobileMamba-based visual state space models with an efficient transformer encoder for soccer object detection. Our approach introduces four key innovations: (1) a MobileMamba backbone leveraging selective state space modeling to achieve linear computational complexity while maintaining global receptive fields; (2) a Semantic-aware Dynamic Feature Fusion Module (SDFM) that adaptively aggregates multi-scale features through progressive semantic injection; (3) a Spatial-Channel Synergistic Attention (SCSA) mechanism that explores the synergistic effects between spatial and channel attention for enhanced feature representation; and (4) a Separable Dynamic Decoder that employs dynamic convolution attention to replace traditional cross-attention, significantly reducing computational overhead. Additionally, we design a Scale-Aware Focal Loss (SAFL) that addresses the class imbalance and scale variation problems inherent in soccer scenarios. Extensive experiments on the Soccana and SoccerNet datasets demonstrate that SoccerDETR achieves state-of-the-art performance with 94.2% mAP@50 on Soccana and 91.8% mAP@50 on SoccerNet, while maintaining real-time inference speed of 78 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU with a batch size of 1 and an input resolution 640 × 640. Our method outperforms existing approaches by 2.3–5.7% in mAP while being 1.5–3.2× faster, demonstrating the effectiveness of state space models for efficient sports video object detection. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each proposed component, and cross-dataset experiments demonstrate strong generalization capability.