Study on Batter-dependent Strike Zone Identification from TV broadcast Images

• Main Authors: Chung-Fu Lee, 李崇甫
• Other Authors: Shun-Feng Su
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/92778551328388369342

碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 電機工程系 === 97 === Besides players’ wonderful acting, fair judgments for all plays in the field is also a very important essential for a good baseball game. The judgment of a strike or a ball made by the head umpire sometimes may have a great influence on deciding who is the winner or the loser in a game or even a series. In this study, we intend to investigate ways of rebuilding the ball trajectories from television images to decide whether the trajectory passes the strike zone or not. It should be noted that the strike zone will depend upon the batters in the field. Thus, algorithms of detecting whether the pitched ball is a strike are proposed and discussed. In our study, the broadcast television images are used to rebuild the baseball trajectories and to find the position when the baseball passes over the home plate. It is noted that in this study we assume the shooting angle of the camera is fixed but unknown. By considering tracking effects, some unnecessary pixels are abandoned in our algorithm to avoid unnecessary pattern matching and to speed up the recognition process. In our algorithms, noise problems caused by various objects around the home plate are resolved by using linear prediction when the ball approaches to the home plate. Afterward, the strike zone for the current batter is built by using chromatological and morphological techniques. Various experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. This system can be employed to help training umpires to avoid making mistakes and can be used to resolve debates in some key situations.