Computer Vision: Tracking a Ball

Project #3218 on iSENSEProject.org

Using a custom program at an early stage in development, the position of a ball being thrown in a video was determined frame-by-frame using computer vision.

Here is an example of the ball being detected in one frame of the video:

The green outline is a quick estimate of the object's shape by the program.  The small red circle indicates the absolute position of the object as calculated by the program.  The position of the red circle, not the green shape, is what is plotted in this project.

The results show a fairly smooth quadratic function.  Note that in the first data set, coordinates (0,0) represent the top left of the video, with values increasing to the bottom right.  On the second data set, the program was run such that it transforms the coordinates to what we would expect.