[Paper] Improvement of Badminton-Player Tracking Applying Image Pixel Compensation

Abstract

Motion analysis of athletes often provides important information to improve training and strategy meetings. Visual player-tracking techniques are being developed that do not need devices. In this paper, we focus on racket sports, since they suffer from technical issues for visual tracking such as small observation size (low resolution) and large variation of player appearances. Moreover, racket sports video is usually captured by a monocular camera at a set position so that each player is observed at a top and a bottom region of the video across a net on the court. As a result, tracking accuracy is damaged by the net that often occludes players on the far side. As a solution, this paper proposes a method to improve the player-tracking accuracy in badminton video by applying an image pixel compensation technique, such as Image Inpainting. We confirm the effectiveness of our method using videos of badminton singles games.