Swimmer Stroke Rate Estimation From Overhead Race Video
This addresses a specific need in sports analytics for swimming, providing automated tools for coaches and analysts, but it is incremental as it focuses on a single metric without broader innovation.
The authors tackled the problem of automatically estimating swimmer stroke rates from overhead race video, proposing a system that works with various video sources like live streams or broadcasts to extract this metric for competition analysis.
In this work, we propose a swimming analytics system for automatically determining swimmer stroke rates from overhead race video (ORV). General ORV is defined as any footage of swimmers in competition, taken for the purposes of viewing or analysis. Examples of this are footage from live streams, broadcasts, or specialized camera equipment, with or without camera motion. These are the most typical forms of swimming competition footage. We detail how to create a system that will automatically collect swimmer stroke rates in any competition, given the video of the competition of interest. With this information, better systems can be created and additions to our analytics system can be proposed to automatically extract other swimming metrics of interest.