Improved Detection of Ball Hit Events in a Tennis Game Using Multimodal Information

We describe a novel framework to detect ball hits in a tennis game by combining audio and visual information. Ball hit detection is a key step in understanding a game such as tennis, but single-mode approaches are not very successful: audio detection suffers from interfering noise and acoustic mismatch, video detection is made difficult by the small size of the ball and the complex background of the surrounding environment. Our goal in this paper is to improve detection performance by focusing on high-level information (rather than low-level features), including the detected audio events, the ball’s trajectory, and inter-event timing information. Visual information supplies coarse detection of the ball-hits events. This information is used as a constraint for audio detection. In addition, useful gains in detection performance can be obtained by using and inter-ballhit timing information, which aids prediction of the next ball hit. This method seems to be very effective in reducing the interference present in low-level features. After applying this method to a women’s doubles tennis game, we obtained improvements in the F-score of about 30% (absolute) for audio detection and about 10% for video detection

Gender-based differences in substrate use during exercise at a self-selected pace

The aim of this study was to investigate gender-based differences in substrate use during exercise at a self-selected pace. Seventeen men and 17 women performed a maximal exercise test and a 20-minute bout of self-paced treadmill walking to determine carbohydrate and fat oxidation rates. Gas exchange measurements were performed throughout the tests, and stoichiometric equations were used to calculate substrate oxidation rates. For each individual, a best-fit polynomial curve was constructed using fat oxidation rate (gmin21) vs. exercise intensity (percentage of maximal oxygen uptake, % _ VO2max). Each individual curve was used to obtain the following variables: maximal fat oxidation (MFO), the peak rate of fat oxidation measured over the entire range of exercise intensities; fatmax, the exercise intensity at which the MFO was observed; and fatmax zone, range of exercise intensities with fat oxidation rates within 10% of fat oxidation rates at fatmax. Although the MFO was similar between genders, fatmax was lower in men than in women. Similarly, the ‘‘low’’ and ‘‘high’’ borders of the fatmax zone were lower in men than in women. During exercise at a self-selected pace, carbohydrate oxidation rates were greater in men than in women, despite no gender-based differences in fat oxidation rates. However, fat oxidation contribution to total energy expenditure (EE) was greater in women than in men, despite no gender-based differences in the exercise intensity. In conclusion, although both genders self-selected a similar exercise intensity, the contribution of fat oxidation to EE is greater in women than in men. Interestingly, both genders selfselected an exercise intensity that falls within the fatmax zone