Real swing extraction for video indexing in golf practice video

This paper describes a method that extracts the start of every real golf swing in golf practice video recorded from face-on camera angle for video indexing. This new method accelerates and improves the process of golf swing analysis by allowing golfer to quickly navigate to the starting point of each real swing. Real swing is the most important part of golf practice video because it truly shows the problem of golfer´s swing. Each start of real swing is extracted by detecting takeaway action at the start of the swing. The system consists of five main processes which are golf club head detection, golf ball detection, takeaway detection, takeaway validation and hit detection. First the golf club shaft is detected by using frame difference, morphological operation, canny edge detection and Hough line transform respectively. After that golf club head is extracted and in order to detect takeaway action accurately, the system also detects golf balls position using HSV color space to extract near white color. Then the information of detected golf clubs and golf balls are used to identify the start of each real swing. The result of experiments on golf practice video with different camera setups and light conditions shows that this method can efficiently extract the beginning of real swings.