Tracking Table Tennis Balls in Real Match Scenes for Umpiring Applications
K. C. P. Wong *
Next Generation Multimedia Technology Group, Department of Communication and Systems, The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom.
L. S. Dooley
Next Generation Multimedia Technology Group, Department of Communication and Systems, The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Judging the legitimacy of table tennis services presents many challenges where technology can be judiciously applied to enhance decision-making. This paper presents a purpose-built system to automatically detect and track the ball during table-tennis services to enable precise judgment over their legitimacy in real-time. The system comprises a suite of algorithms which adaptively exploit spatial and temporal information from real match video sequences, which are generally characterised by high object motion, allied with object blurring and occlusion. Experimental results on a diverse set of table-tennis test sequences corroborate the system performance in facilitating consistently accurate and efficient decision-making over the validity of a service.
Keywords: Video processing, image segmentation, object detection, object tracking, table tennis, umpiring