Prediction of Foul Ball Falling Spot in a Base Ball Game

Abstract

In baseball games, foul balls sometimes fly into the spectators seats. Some person can be seriously wounded for those balls. This research aims at developing a system which computes the orbit of a foul ball on real time using camera, predicts of the spot where foul balls fall and informs spectators about its danger. Detection of balls consists of the following three steps: At first each frame is processed using a smoothing filter for noise reduction. Next, temporal Laplacian is carried out for a series of those filtered images. Finally, whether a part of a ball or not is judged for each pixel by translating the resultant images into polar coordinates. The pitching motion is also considered. We report a method for prediction of foul ball falling spot with fuzzy inference.