A Vision Based Interactive Billiard Ball Entertainment System

A billiard ball tracking system is designed to combine with a visual guiding interface run on a PC to instruct users of game playing strategy. The system makes use of a vision system for tracking of the cue ball, and target ball locations. A visual display system instructs users of an ideal striking direction of a cue ball using a cue stick to sink a selected object ball into a target pocket in the real world. Both sub-systems are fully integrated through a least square error calibration process, which correlates the real world, and the virtual world pool ball coordinates. The vision system has been tested to extract and recognize the different balls´ identity and their center positions. The system has been tested to work together successfully in a mini-prototype pool table. Users are able to adjust the cue stick on the table according to the visual instruction displayed on a PC. Arbitrarily selected object ball can be driven into the target pocket accordingly.