Estimation of 3-D Trajectory of the Golf Ball Using Dual Linear Sensor

In this paper, a new sensor system for sensing the trajectory of a golf ball is proposed. The proposed system has simple structure, four horizontal sensing lines, so it has low costs in manufacturing and maintaining the sensor compared to others. It extracts raw data from the ball and the club and passes them to the personal computer that has more computing power compared to the sensor itself. Raw data generated by the sensor contains information of the shadow variation of the ball and the club with the time-stamp values. The shadow blobs are identified from raw data and primitive features such as the velocity and the direction of initial movement are calculated directly from them. A final ball movement, called ball flight, is estimated by considering side spin of the ball which is estimated from primitive features. Experimental results show that the proposed system is effective in estimating complicated ball flight and practical in golf simulator system.