High-motion table tennis ball tracking for umpiring applications

Table-tennis umpiring presents many challenges where technology can be judiciously applied to enhance decision-making, especially in the service facet of the game. This paper presents a system to automatically detect and track the ball during table-tennis services to enable precise judgment over their legitimacy. The system comprises a suite of algorithms that adaptively exploit spatial and temporal information from real match videos, which are generally characterized by high object motion, allied with object blurring and occlusion. Experimental results on various table-tennis test videos corroborate the system performance in facilitating accurate and efficient decision-making over the validity of a service.