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Pitching a baseball: tracking high-speed motion with multi-exposure images

Published: 01 August 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Athletes and coaches in most professional sports make use of high-tech equipment to analyze and, subsequently, improve the athlete's performance. High-speed video cameras are employed, for instance, to record the swing of a golf club or a tennis racket, the movement of the feet while running, and the body motion in apparatus gymnastics. High-tech and high-speed equipment, however, usually implies high-cost as well. In this paper, we present a passive optical approach to capture high-speed motion using multi-exposure images obtained with low-cost commodity still cameras and a stroboscope. The recorded motion remains completely undisturbed by the motion capture process. We apply our approach to capture the motion of hand and ball for a variety of baseball pitches and present algorithms to automatically track the position, velocity, rotation axis, and spin of the ball along its trajectory. To demonstrate the validity of our setup and algorithms, we analyze the consistency of our measurements with a physically based model that predicts the trajectory of a spinning baseball. Our approach can be applied to capture a wide variety of other high-speed objects and activities such as golfing, bowling, or tennis for visualization as well as analysis purposes.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 23, Issue 3
August 2004
684 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/1015706
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 August 2004
Published in TOG Volume 23, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. high-speed motion capture
  2. multi-exposure images
  3. physically based validation
  4. pitching and flight of baseball

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  • (2023)SpinDOE: A Ball Spin Estimation Method for Table Tennis Robot2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342178(5744-5750)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Machine Vision-Based Ping Pong Ball Rotation Trajectory Tracking AlgorithmComputational Intelligence and Neuroscience10.1155/2022/38356492022Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Vision-Based Hand Activity RecognitionVision-Based Human Activity Recognition10.1007/978-981-19-2290-9_2(13-56)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2022
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