Measuring and display system of a marathon runner by real-time digital image processing
Nobuyuki Sasaki, Iwao Namikawa · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1991
The measuring and display system for a marathon TV program employing a real-time image processor and a fast graphic processor has been developed. The system consists of three parts: the step frequency subsystem; the automatic TV camera tracking subsystem; and the computer graphic display subsystem. Actually it is the first trial which could track the motion of a runner's face and obtain the step frequency and display the runner's motion at a real-time rate in the sports program. In the step frequency subsystem, the step frequency for a marathon runner is detected by applying two different methods: measuring the area corresponding the figure of a runner and tracking the motion vector of a runner's face. By applying the result of detecting the motion vector, the automatic TV camera tracking subsystem is implemented. In the computer graphic display subsystem, the data for the position of each joint in the runner's leg are prepared beforehand. By applying the step frequency to those prepared data, the runner's motion is drawn out as an 3-D animation.