Low speed ball movement detection with a multi-exposure camera system

Abstract

The sports have given merits to the people from the beginning of the world. Among various advantages, it could be the best one for people to communicate with others when they play sports. Especially, golf has been spotlighted as the sports in a view above mentioned. In Korea, the number of people enjoying golf has also been increased, but the environments, where everyone could play it in outdoor, have not been provided yet. As a result, the needs that people want to play golf in indoor have been occurred, and its commercial scale has been $ 1,000 billion in the year of 2008. There are important factors for indoor golf. Most of all, the sensing system factor is regarded as a core element to extract the physical information of flight balls. The sensing systems have used various sensors such as the radar, the laser, the IR LED (infra-red light-emitting diode), and the vision. Most commercial applications`` sensng systems are made up of the laser or IR LED sensors for measuring the ball movement easily. However, these systems have limitations and errors in a case of the short ball movement. To overcome such defects of those systems, the applications have shifted the construction method of the sensing system toward utilizing the vision sensor technology. The vision sensing systems generally use high speed cameras, which are high cost, to get fine data. However, the comparatively cheap vision system with low fps camera could be used performing as the one using high fps camera, if it has to have an additional strobe device, such as the lighting or the internal electronical shutter, in the multi-exposure photographing way. So, the constructed system, which consists of two low fps camera and a fixed-frequency stroboscopic lighting, has been constructed in this thesis, and it was designed to capture various movement of a ball as the original form as possible. However, the cases that the flight balls are overlapped in images could be appeared unexpectedly because of th...