Tracking Table Tennis Balls in Real Match Scenes for Umpiring Applications

Judging the legitimacy of table tennis services presents many challenges where technology can be judiciously applied to enhance decision-making. This paper presents a purpose-built system to automatically detect and track the ball during table-tennis services to enable precise judgment over their legitimacy in real-time. The system comprises a suite of algorithms which adaptively exploit spatial and temporal information from real match video sequences, which are generally characterised by high object motion, allied with object blurring and occlusion. Experimental results on a diverse set of table-tennis test sequences corroborate the system performance in facilitating consistently accurate and efficient decision-making over the validity of a service.