抄録
The authors have recently developed a system for analyzing the spin on a baseball (Koseki et al., 2007). In the present study we analyzed the spin pitched by a professional pitcher. He pitched eight different pitches, each twice, from official pitching mound. The image of ball in the period from just before to 500 ms after the ball release was taken with a high speed video camera at 1000 fps. English alphabets E, M, A, and I were marked on the ball for image processing. Feature points from the image stream were assembled into a set of linear equations that represents orientation change between consecutive two frames by rotation matrix R, and the direction of spin axis and spin rate were obtained. Both values varied considerably depending on pitches. The recording of spin was suggested to be valuable for training if the data could be combined with those of motion analysis.
