A Trajectory Estimation Method for Badminton Shuttlecock Utilizing Motion Blur

To build a robust visual tracking method it is important to consider issues such as low observation resolution and variation in the target object’s shape. When we capture an object moving fast in a video camera motion blur is observed. This paper introduces a visual trajectory estimation method using blur characteristics in the 3D space. We acquire a movement speed vector based on the shape of a motion blur region. This method can extract both the position and speed of the moving object from an image frame, and apply them to a visual tracking process using Kalman filter. We estimated the 3D position of the object based on the information obtained from two different viewpoints as shown in figure 1. We evaluated our proposed method by the trajectory estimation of a badminton shuttlecock from video sequences of a badminton game.