Calling a table tennis fault serve has never been easy for umpires, since they can only rely on their intuition. This study presents an algorithm that is able to automatically find the positions of the ball and racket in the images captured by high-speed camera. The trajectory of ball toss is analyzed and the result can be used as the objective basis for the umpire to decide if the serve is legal. This algorithm mainly consists of YCbCr color space processing, morphological processing method, circle Hough transform application, separation of moving and static components in an image sequence using the stable principal component pursuit method. The experiment results show that YCbCr color space provides better performance than HSV color space in recognizing the ball color close to skin tone. It is also demonstrated that the positions of the ball and racket can be successfully located by using the methods of color segmentation and stable principal component pursuit. Lastly, it is hoped that this study will provide more useful information regarding how to identify illegal ball toss in tennis ball game using image processing techniques to other researchers.
Keywords: YCbCr image segmentation; automatic tracking; computer-aided table tennis ruling; stable principal component pursuit.