In this work, the novel task of detecting and classifying table tennis strokes solely using the ball trajectory has been explored. A single camera setup positioned in the umpire's view has been employed to procure a dataset consisting of six stroke classes executed by four professional table tennis players. Ball tracking using YOLOv4, a traditional object detection model, and TrackNetv2, a temporal heatmap based model, have been implemented on our dataset and their performances have been benchmarked. A mathematical approach developed to extract temporal boundaries of strokes using the ball trajectory data yielded a total of 2023 valid strokes in our dataset, while also detecting services and missed strokes successfully. The temporal convolutional network developed performed stroke recognition on completely unseen data with an accuracy of 87.155%. Several machine learning and deep learning based model architectures have been trained for stroke recognition using ball trajectory input and benchmarked based on their performances. While stroke recognition in the field of table tennis has been extensively explored based on human action recognition using video data focused on the player's actions, the use of ball trajectory data for the same is an unexplored characteristic of the sport. Hence, the motivation behind the work is to demonstrate that meaningful inferences such as stroke detection and recognition can be drawn using minimal input information.
We introduce a novel method for collecting table tennis video data and perform stroke detection and classification. A diverse dataset containing video data of 11 basic strokes obtained from 14 professional table tennis players, summing up to a total of 22111 videos has been collected using the proposed setup. The temporal convolutional neural network model developed using 2D pose estimation performs multiclass classification of these 11 table tennis strokes with a validation accuracy of 99.37%. Moreover, the neural network generalizes well over the data of a player excluded from the training a…
We present a neural network TTNet aimed at real-time processing of high-resolution table tennis videos, providing both temporal (events spotting) and spatial (ball detection and semantic segmentation) data. This approach gives core information for reasoning score updates by an auto-referee system. We also publish a multi-task dataset OpenTTGames with videos of table tennis games in 120 fps labeled with events, semantic segmentation masks, and ball coordinates for evaluation of multi-task approaches, primarily oriented on spotting of quick events and small objects tracking. TTNet demonstrated 9…
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology（马克斯·普朗克进化人类学研究所）
This paper presents a table tennis stroke detection method from videos. The method relies on a two-stream Convolutional Neural Network processing in parallel the RGB Stream and its computed optical flow. The method has been developed as part of the MediaEval 2021 benchmark for the Sport task. Our contribution did not outperform the provided baseline on the test set but has performed the best among the other participants with regard to the mAP metric.
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology（马克斯·普朗克进化人类学研究所）；La Rochelle University（拉罗谢尔大学）；Univ. Bordeaux（波尔多大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Bordeaux INP（波尔多国立高等理工学院）；LaBRI（波尔多计算机科学实验室）；University of Bordeaux（波尔多大学）
Sports video analysis is a prevalent research topic due to the variety of application areas, ranging from multimedia intelligent devices with user-tailored digests up to analysis of athletes' performance. The Sports Video task is part of the MediaEval 2021 benchmark. This task tackles fine-grained action detection and classification from videos. The focus is on recordings of table tennis games. Running since 2019, the task has offered a classification challenge from untrimmed video recorded in natural conditions with known temporal boundaries for each stroke. This year, the dataset is extended…
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology（马克斯·普朗克进化人类学研究所）；La Rochelle University（拉罗谢尔大学）；University of Bordeaux（波尔多大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Bordeaux INP（波尔多国立理工学院）
Sports video analysis is a widespread research topic. Its applications are very diverse, like events detection during a match, video summary, or fine-grained movement analysis of athletes. As part of the MediaEval 2022 benchmarking initiative, this task aims at detecting and classifying subtle movements from sport videos. We focus on recordings of table tennis matches. Conducted since 2019, this task provides a classification challenge from untrimmed videos recorded under natural conditions with known temporal boundaries for each stroke. Since 2021, the task also provides a stroke detection ch…
University of Bordeaux（波尔多大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Bordeaux INP（波尔多国立高等物理、数学与信息学院）；University of La Rochelle（拉罗谢尔大学）
The paper addresses the problem of recognition of actions in video with low inter-class variability such as Table Tennis strokes. Two stream, "twin" convolutional neural networks are used with 3D convolutions both on RGB data and optical flow. Actions are recognized by classification of temporal windows. We introduce 3D attention modules and examine their impact on classification efficiency. In the context of the study of sportsmen performances, a corpus of the particular actions of table tennis strokes is considered. The use of attention blocks in the network speeds up the training step and i…
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology（马克斯·普朗克进化人类学研究所）；Univ. Bordeaux（波尔多大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Bordeaux INP（波尔多国立理工学院）；LaBRI（波尔多计算机科学研究所）；MIA, La Rochelle University（拉罗谢尔大学MIA研究所）；IMS, University of Bordeaux（波尔多大学IMS研究所）
This paper proposes a fusion method of modalities extracted from video through a three-stream network with spatio-temporal and temporal convolutions for fine-grained action classification in sport. It is applied to TTStroke-21 dataset which consists of untrimmed videos of table tennis games. The goal is to detect and classify table tennis strokes in the videos, the first step of a bigger scheme aiming at giving feedback to the players for improving their performance. The three modalities are raw RGB data, the computed optical flow and the estimated pose of the player. The network consists of t…
In table tennis, the rotation (spin) of the ball plays a crucial role. A table tennis match will feature a variety of strokes. Each generates different amounts and types of spin. To develop a robot that can compete with a human player, the robot needs to detect spin, so it can plan an appropriate return stroke. In this paper we compare three methods to estimate spin. The first two approaches use a high-speed camera that captures the ball in flight at a frame rate of 380 Hz. This camera allows the movement of the circular brand logo printed on the ball to be seen. The first approach uses backgr…
La Trobe University（拉筹伯大学）；Australian Institute of Sport（澳大利亚体育学院）
In many sports, it is useful to analyse video of an athlete in competition for training purposes. In swimming, stroke rate is a common metric used by coaches; requiring a laborious labelling of each individual stroke. We show that using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) we can automatically detect discrete events in continuous video (in this case, swimming strokes). We create a CNN that learns a mapping from a window of frames to a point on a smooth 1D target signal, with peaks denoting the location of a stroke, evaluated as a sliding window. To our knowledge this process of training and ut…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
The popularity of racket sports (e.g., tennis and table tennis) leads to high demands for data analysis, such as notational analysis, on player performance. While sports videos offer many benefits for such analysis, retrieving accurate information from sports videos could be challenging. In this paper, we propose EventAnchor, a data analysis framework to facilitate interactive annotation of racket sports video with the support of computer vision algorithms. Our approach uses machine learning models in computer vision to help users acquire essential events from videos (e.g., serve, the ball bou…
University of Leipzig（莱比锡大学）；Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology（马克斯·普朗克进化人类学研究所）
As participants of the MediaEval 2022 Sport Task, we propose a two-stream network approach for the classification and detection of table tennis strokes. Each stream is a succession of 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) blocks using attention mechanisms. Each stream processes different 4D inputs. Our method utilizes raw RGB data and pose information computed from MMPose toolbox. The pose information is treated as an image by applying the pose either on a black background or on the original RGB frame it has been computed from. Best performance is obtained by feeding raw RGB data to one stream…
Event-based Gaze Control System for Accurate Real-time Spin Estimation in Professional Ball Games
Sony AI, Tokyo, Japan（索尼AI，东京，日本）；Sony AI, Zürich, Switzerland（索尼AI，苏黎世，瑞士）；Sony Advanced Visual Sensing, Sony Europe Ltd., Zurich, Switzerland（索尼高级视觉感知，索尼欧洲有限公司，苏黎世，瑞士）
