Developing an Intelligent Assistant for Table Tennis Umpires

This paper outlines the idea and plan of developing an intelligent assistant for table tennis umpire in evaluating services. Table tennis is a fast sport. A service usually takes a few second to complete but there are many observations an umpire needs to take and makes a judgment before or soon after the service is complete. This is a complex task and the author believes the employment of videography, image processing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies could help evaluating the service. The aim of this research is to develop an intelligent system which is able to track the location of the ball from live video images and evaluate the service according to the service rules. This is a pilot study and the focus is on the development of the techniques, rather than building a complete system. Various videography, image processing and artificial intelligence techniques will be experimented and evaluated. When a prototype system is built, it will be compared and tested against the judgments of a human umpire. Both the accuracy and rate of responses will be concerned. Furthermore, as well as aiding umpire, the system could also benefit players who want to have their services evaluated in real time without the need of having a human umpire present