Ball movement detection system with dual cameras for sports simulation

Abstract

Recently, realistic sports games have been one of the growth industries of the indoor entertainment field. In particular, screen-golf, which is played indoors with real golf clubs and balls, has shown an outstand-ing growth rate. It consists of a sensor, a simulator, a display and other elements. The sensor is the most essential component among them. It measures the initial conditions of a flying golf ball, the velocity, the horizontal angle, and the vertical angle, and a moving club, the velocity, the vertical path angle, and the horizontal path angle. Until 2008, most commercialized products were IR LED type sensors, but these are associated with relatively low accuracy and a narrow measurement range compared to those that utilize a camera. In spite of the better performance, camera-based screen-golf sensors are not broadly employed in the screen-golf market because they remain expensive compared with other screen-golf sensors. In this dissertation, a new type of camera-based sensor system that captures time synchronized multi-exposure images and ball tracking technique and club tracking technique for various shots are suggested to measure the initial condition of a flying golf ball and a moving club from captured multiexposure images. The suggested system was verified in an environment equal to that of a real screen-golf store.