Measuring initial conditions for baseball pitching games

Abstract

Sports arcade games use a ball simulator to predict the trajectory of a flying ball with initial conditions, including ball speed and spin. Therefore, the accurate measurement of initial conditions of a flying ball is a critical issue for sports arcade games. In usual, high-tech equipment, such as Doppler radars and high-speed video cameras, is used for commercial sports arcade game systems. However, such high-tech equipment increases the system cost for developing sports arcade games. Multi-exposure cameras can be adopted for sports arcade games instead of using such high-tech, high-cost equipment. A golf game system with multi-exposure cameras has been introduced in the related work [Kim and Kim 2012]. In this paper, a new approach for measuring initial conditions of a pitched baseball with multi-exposure cameras is presented for baseball pitching games. The new approach can robustly detect baseball regions and surface patterns to measure initial conditions with high accuracy regardless of illumination conditions.