Tracking a table tennis ball for umpiring purposes

This study investigates tracking a table-tennis ball rapidly from video captured using low-cost equipment for umpiring purposes. A number of highly efficient algorithms have been developed for this purpose. The proposed system was tested using sequences capture from real match scenes. The preliminary results of experiments show that accurate and rapid tracking can be achieved even under challenging conditions, including occlusion and colour merging. This work can contribute to the development of an automatic umpiring system and also has the potential to provide amateur users open access to a detection tool for fast-moving, small, round objects

A BADMINTON ROBOT -SERVING OPERATION DESIGN

ABSTRACT Building a sport robot that can defeat human players in sport activities is the aim of many researchers and engineers in robotic related fields. This paper presents a design of a mobile badminton robot that can serve a shuttlecock as a human player in a standard badminton court. A transporting shuttlecock system was designed to preload six shuttlecocks. A serving mechanism was designed to swing a standard badminton racquet to hit a dropping shuttlecock timely. The challenges and the proposed solutions that involved during the development of the shuttlecock serving system and serving mechanism are discussed. Findings indicate that the proposed design is able to preload and serve six shuttlecocks continuously with a success serving rate of 89% in a standard badminton court when the time between swinging the racquet and dropping a shuttlecock was optimized

A Novel Multi-View Table Tennis Umpiring Framework

This research investigates the development of a low-cost multi-view umpiring framework, as an alternative to the current expensive systems that are almost exclusively restricted to elite professional sports. Table tennis has been selected as the testbed because, while automating the process is challenging, it has many different complex match elements including the service, return and rallies, which are governed by a strict set of regulations. The focus is mainly on the rally element rather than the whole match. Ball detection and tracking in video frames are undertaken to determine reliably the ball position relative to key reference objects like the table surface and net, and the ball’s flight path is used to determine the rally’s status. While a low-cost option has benefits, it is technically challenging due to the limited number of cameras and generally low video resolution used. This thesis presents a portable multi-view umpiring framework that identifies each state change in a rally. It makes three significant contributions to knowledge: i) a reliable ball detection strategy that accurately detects the location of the ball in low-resolution sequences; ii) a novel framework for ball tracking using a multi-view system, and iii) a new state-machine based evaluation system for analysing table tennis rallies. In a series of ten different test scenarios, the system achieved an average of 94% system detection rate and 100% accurate decisions. A test sequence of duration 1 s can be processed in 8 s, leading to a delay of only 7 s, which is considered acceptable for practical purposes. This solution has the potential to reform the way matches are umpired, providing objectivity in resolving disputed decisions. It affords an economic technology for amateur players, while the multi-view facility is extendible to other relevant ball-based sports. Finally, the ball flight path analysis mechanism can be a valuable training tool for skills development

A Robot Referee for Robot Soccer

The aim of this paper is to propose a robot referee for robot soccer. This idea is implemented using a service robot that moves along one of the field sides, uses its own cameras to analyze the game, and communicates its decisions to the human spectators using speech, and to the robot players using wireless communication. The robot uses a video-based game analysis toolbox that is able to analyze the actions at up to 20fps. This toolbox includes robots, ball, landmarks, and lines detection and tracking, as well as refereeing decisionmaking. This robot system is validated and characterized in real game situations with humanoid robot players.This research was partially supported by FONDECYT (Chile) under Project Number 1061158