Title
Automatic spin measurements for pitched Baseballs via consumer-grade high-speed cameras.
Abstract
Controlling the spin of a ball is important in a variety of sports, especially baseball. For an athlete to properly train, it is necessary to know spin information immediately after throwing or hitting a baseball. This paper presents a fully automatic and marker-free technique to measure both the spin rate and spin axis of a pitched baseball using a consumer-grade high-speed camera. After tracking a ball from the high-speed video, our technique measures spin rate by detecting periods in which similar ball images appear, and then estimates spin axis by performing rigid registration that considers three-dimensional rotation. By separating the spin rate measurement and spin axis estimation processes, we achieve reasonable computational efficiency and robustness for small blurred baseball images extracted from video. We evaluated the accuracy of our presented technique by using synthesized videos. To illustrate the feasibility of our technique, we applied it to a variety of breaking ball pitches captured under normal outdoor lighting conditions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s11760-017-1075-x
Signal, Image and Video Processing
Keywords
Field
DocType
High-speed video, Spin analysis, Baseball
Computer vision,Spin-½,Computer graphics (images),Throwing,Robustness (computer science),Artificial intelligence,Rate measurement,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
11
7
1863-1711
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
12
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Takashi Ijiri124218.34
Nakamura, A.220.92
Akira Hirabayashi31615.38
Wataru Sakai400.34
Takeshi Miyazaki500.68
Ryutaro Himeno64313.10