An automatic timing method for photo finish

Manual detection in photo finishing is subjective and of low efficiency. In this study, an automatic detection method is proposed to detect the finish line on the photograph. The object is abstracted by a self-adaption background substraction algorithm based on the specific feature of line scan image. Then an estimative target region mehod is proposed to detect the effective body part for the finish line. The effectiveness of this method is verified by 1312 samples which contain a single contestant, and achieved the correctness of 86.3% within a tolerance of 4 ms time-accuracy. The experiment indicates the proposed method can achieve objective and accurate detection result.