Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

Contour-based strike zone shaping and visualization in broadcast baseball video: providing reference for pitch location positioning and strike/ball judgment

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The strike zone plays a crucial role in baseball. Pitches which pass through the strike zone count as strikes, three of which strike out the batter. Besides strike/ball judgment, the strike zone also provides the reference for positioning pitch locations, about which sports fans and professionals have an intense interest in compiling statistics. This paper presents contour-based strike zone shaping and visualization in broadcast baseball video. We first detect the home plate, which determines the vertical limits of the strike zone. Then, an efficient algorithm is designed for batter contouring and the points of curvature extremes on the batter’s contour are computed to locate the dominant points which determine the horizontal limits of the strike zone. The experiments show that the proposed framework is able to shape the strike zone fairly well in various baseball sequences, needless of manual operation and additional camera setting. The proposed strike zone shaping and visualization will be able to assist in pitch analysis and statistics compiling.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15
Fig. 16
Fig. 17

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Assfalg J, Bertini M, Colombo C, Bimbo AD, Nunziati W (2003) Semantic annotation of soccer videos: automatic highlights identification. Comput Vis Image Underst 92(2–3):285–305. doi:10.1016/j.cviu.2003.06.004

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Chen HS, Chen HT, Tsai WJ, Lee SY, Yu JY (2007) Pitch-by-pitch extraction from single view baseball video sequences. In: Proc. ICME 2007:1423–1426

    Google Scholar 

  3. Chen HT, Chen HS, Lee SY (2007) Physics-based ball tracking in volleyball videos with its applications to set type recognition and action detection. In: Proc. IEEE ICASSP 2007, pp. I- 1097–1100

  4. Chen HT, Hsiao MH, Chen HS, Tsai WJ, Lee SY (2008) A baseball exploration system using spatial pattern recognition. In: Proc. IEEE ISCAS 2008, pp. 3522–3525

  5. Chen HT, Chen HS, Hsiao MH, Tsai WJ, Lee SY (2008) A trajectory-based ball tracking framework with visual enrichment for broadcast baseball videos. J Inf Sci Eng 24(1):143–157

    Google Scholar 

  6. Chen HT, Tien MC, Chen YW, Tsai WJ, Lee SY (2009) Physics-based ball tracking and 3D trajectory reconstruction with applications to shooting location estimation in basketball video. J Vis Commun Image Representation 20:204–216. doi:10.1016/j.jvcir.2008.11.008

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Cheng CC, Hsu CT (2006) Fusion of audio and motion information on HMM-based highlight extraction for baseball games. IEEE Trans Multimed 8:585–599. doi:10.1109/TMM.2006.870726

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Denman H, Rea N, Kokaram A (2003) Content-based analysis for video from snooker broadcasts. Comput Vis Image Underst 92:176–195. doi:10.1016/j.cviu.2003.06.005

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Duan LY, Xu M, Tian Q (2005) A unified framework for semantic shot classification in sports video. IEEE Trans Multimed 7:1066–1083. doi:10.1109/TMM.2005.858395

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Ekin A, Tekalp AM, Mehrotra R (2003) Automatic soccer video analysis and summarization. IEEE Trans Image Process 12(7):796–807. doi:10.1109/TIP.2003.812758

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Gueziec A (2002) Tracking pitches for broadcast television. Computer 35:38–43. doi:10.1109/2.989928

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Luo Y, Wu TD, Hwang JN (2003) Object-based analysis and interpretation of human motion in sports video sequences by dynamic bayesian networks. Comput Vis Image Underst 92(2–3):196–216. doi:10.1016/j.cviu.2003.08.001

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Mei T, Hua XS (2008) Structure and event mining in sports video with efficient mosaic. Multimedia Tools Appl 40:89–110. doi:10.1007/s11042-007-0186-8

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Piegl L, Tiller W (1997) The NURBS Book. Springer, ISBN 3-540-61545-8

  15. QuesTec — Umpire Information System [Online].Available: http://www.questec.com/q2001/prod_uis.htm

  16. Tien MC, Chen HT, Chen YW, Hsiao MH, Lee SY (2007) Shot classification of basketball videos and its applications in shooting position extraction. In: Proc. IEEE ICASSP 2007, pp. I-1085-1088

  17. Wang JR, Parameswaran N (2005) Analyzing tennis tactics from broadcasting tennis video clips. In: Proc. 11th IEEE Int. Multimedia Modelling Conf., pp. 102–106

  18. Xu C, Wang J, Lu H, Zhang Y (2008) A novel framework for semantic annotation and personalized retrieval of sports video. IEEE Trans Multimed 10(3):421–436. doi:10.1109/TMM.2008.917346

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Yu X, Xu C, Leong HW, Tian Q, Tang Q, Wan KW (2003) Trajectory-based ball detection and tracking with applications to semantic analysis of broadcast soccer video. In: Proc. 11th ACM Int. Conf. on Multimedia, pp. 11–20

  20. Zhong D, Chang SF (2001) Structure analysis of sports video using domain models. In: Proc. IEEE ICME 2001, pp. 713–716.

  21. Zhu G, Huang Q, Xu C, Rui Y, Jiang S, Gao W, Yao H (2007) Trajectory based event tactics analysis in broadcast sports video. In: Proc. 15th ACM Int. Conf. on Multimedia, pp. 58–67

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, National Chiao-Tung University, 1001 Ta-Hsueh Road, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan

    Hua-Tsung Chen, Wen-Jiin Tsai & Suh-Yin Lee

Authors
  1. Hua-Tsung Chen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Wen-Jiin Tsai
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Suh-Yin Lee
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hua-Tsung Chen.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Chen, HT., Tsai, WJ. & Lee, SY. Contour-based strike zone shaping and visualization in broadcast baseball video: providing reference for pitch location positioning and strike/ball judgment. Multimed Tools Appl 47, 239–255 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0321-9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0321-9

Keywords