Research projects

Development of a video-based position tracking system for automatic acquisition of the ball trajectories in caromarom billiard

01.03.2010

The aim of this project was to develop a video-based position tracking system for the automatic acquisition of the ball trajectories in carom billard. Therefore a Basler high-speed camera was mounted together with a specially constructed lightning system that increases the accuracy of the results, on the ceiling above the billard table. To guarantee a fluently video stream a sampling frequency of 100Hz is adjusted. Basically, the software, which was developed in LabVIEW, uses several visual instruments to create one template of each ball in the first step and detect these templates on the acquired images afterwards. The detection takes place in two separate steps. First, the shapes of the template is detected, and second, the colour of the template is compared with the colour of the detected shape. Finally, the coordinates of the matching balls, based on the colour comparison, is stored into the appropriate 2D-Array of each ball. This software offers a user-friendly and high accurate possibility for position tracking in carom-billard. It can be used to create a huge number of different statistics about the players’ behaviour. Furthermore, it offers the possibility to adopt it into the training what leads to an increase of the players performance.