Painless Tennis Ball Tracking System
Wook-Sung Yoo, Zach Jones, Henok Atsbaha, David Wingfield · 2018
Tennis ball machines help tennis players develop their game to perfect a particular stroke or area of performance. However, current commercial tennis ball machines do not provide an automatic feedback mechanism of tracking their performance, and so the collection of shot data captured during a training session is manually recorded onto paper or an electronic record. With improvements of video technology, such as computing power and resolution rate, the motion analysis and tracking of objects have been actively researched and partially successful in some sports, particularly in baseball and soccer. However, tracking a fast moving, small tennis ball is a challenging task. To solve this problem, Painless Tennis Ball Tracking System (PTBTS) has been developed to automate the collection of shot data during a tennis training session using computer vision techniques. A new algorithm has been developed to detect the boundary of court, the tennis ball's movement, and the bounce location of a player's shot. Hardware components were designed for real-time video capture and image processing as well as communication with hand-held devices. Experimental results show that our approach is robust and has a tracking accuracy that can be integrated with current commercial tennis ball machines, which would be installed by local companies. Details of the system and future enhancement are discussed.