How to recognize a ball in an image and then model it in 3D(HawkEye System)

Question

We are trying to develop HawkEye System used in cricket for our college project. The process used in HawkEye System is as follows:

1. images of the the ba

Answer 1

With respect to step 2, extracting the location of a ball, there are a multitude of possible approaches and sources of literature. I would strongly recommend looking into the work on Robot soccer (Robocup), which contains many examples of similar problems.

In an ideal world (say a black disk on a white background), the starting point would probably be to use something like a Hough Transform, or contour tracing, and extracting the position using statistical moments of the resultant contour.

The challenge of this approach is that a cricket field is most definitely going to have background features that are challenging to remove. With some trial and error you may be able to use common image processing techniques such as background subtraction, morphological operators, edge detectors, color filtering and thresholding to improve your capability to consistently find the ball. From past experience, I strongly recommend using a set of tools that allows you to rapidly prototype image processing pipelines and techniques, probably MATLAB.

Perhaps a more robust way to phrase this problem, leading into the following sections, is that if you have some idea of where the ball was previously, then you can make a reasonable estimation of where the ball should be after some small amount of time. This is the field of optimal estimation, and Kalman Filters. A good introductory text, albeit from a very different problem space, is Probabilistic Robotics by Thrun et al.