Detection of Aerial Balls Using a Kinect Sensor

Detection of objects in the air is a difficult problem to tackle given the dynamics and speed of a flying object. The problem is even more difficult when considering a non-controlled environment where the predominance of a given color is not guaranteed, and/or when the vision system is located on a moving platform. As an example, most of the Middle Size League teams in RoboCup competition detect the objects in the environment using an omni directional camera that only detects the ball when in the ground, and losing any precise information of the ball position when in the air. In this paper we present a first approach towards the detection of a ball flying using a Kinect camera as sensor. The approach only uses 3D data and does not consider, at this time, any additional intensity information. The objective at this stage is to evaluate how useful is the use of 3D information in the Middle Size League context. A simple algorithm to detect a flying ball and evaluate its trajectory was implemented and preliminary results are presented.