Towards Automated Key-Point Detection in Images with Partial Pool View
This work addresses challenges in swimming analytics for sports organizations and researchers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing detection and tracking methods.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting invariant key-points in swimming pools from images with partial views, which is common in race videos, by presenting a pool model and studying the detectability of these key-points.
Sports analytics has been an up-and-coming field of research among professional sporting organizations and academic institutions alike. With the insurgence and collection of athlete data, the primary goal of such analysis is to improve athletes' performance in a measurable and quantifiable manner. This work is aimed at alleviating some of the challenges encountered in the collection of adequate swimming data. Past works on this subject have shown that the detection and tracking of swimmers is feasible, but not without challenges. Among these challenges are pool localization and determining the relative positions of the swimmers relative to the pool. This work presents two contributions towards solving these challenges. First, we present a pool model with invariant key-points relevant for swimming analytics. Second, we study the detectability of such key-points in images with partial pool view, which are challenging but also quite common in swimming race videos.