An On-Line Algorithm for Measuring the Translational and Rotational Velocities of a Table Tennis Ball

摘要

This paper proposes an on-line method for estimating both translational and rotational velocities of a table tennis ball by using only a few consecutive frames of image data which are sensed by two high speed cameras. In order to estimate the translational velocity, three-dimensional (3D) position of the ball's center at each instant of camera frame is obtained, where the on-line method of reconstructing the 3D position from the two-dimensional (2D) image data of two cameras is proposed without the pattern matching process. The proposed method of estimating the rotational velocity belongs to the image registration methods, where in order to avoid the pattern matching process too, a rotation model of the ball is used to make an estimated image data from an image data sensed at the previous instant of camera frame and then the estimated image data are compared with the image data sensed at the next instant of camera frame to obtain the most plausible rotational velocity by using the least square and the conjugate gradient method. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by some experimental results in the case of a ball rotated by a rotation machine as well as in the case of a flying ball shot from a catapult machine.