Tracking a ball during bounce and roll using recurrent neural networks

Sammanfattning: In many types of sports, on-screen graphics such as an reconstructed ball trajectory, can be displayed for spectators or players in order to increase understanding. One sub-problem of trajectory reconstruction is tracking of ball positions, which is a difficult problem due to the fast and often complex ball movement. Historically, physics based techniques have been used to track ball positions, but this thesis investigates using a recurrent neural network design, in the application of tracking bouncing golf balls. The network is trained and tested on synthetically created golf ball shots, created to imitate balls shot out from a golf driving range. It is found that the trained network succeeds in tracking golf balls during bounce and roll, with an error rate of under 11 %.