Hawk-Eye: How does this innovation work in sports?
If you are familiar with the sport of Cricket, Tennis or Snooker then you might be familiar with Hawk-Eye as well. It is a sophisticated computer system that is used to visually track the ball and is able to accurately show a record of the ball’s path and is also able to predict the future movement as well. All this is done with the help of high speed cameras and a complex algorithm. Let us see how this works in real life.
The Hawk-Eye system is based on the principle of triangulation – the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end of a fixed baseline, rather than measuring distances to the point directly. This is pretty much the same concept used by GPS satellites as well.
In the case of Hawk-Eye, there are four high speed cameras placed at different locations and angles at the area of play. In each frame of the video captured these are the steps performed:
- System identifies the group of pixels which corresponds to the actual ball
- The 3D position of the ball is calculated by comparing the position against at least 2 other cameras (this is where triangulation comes into play)
Using the laws of physics, the future flight of the ball is calculated. This is very useful for making line calls and decisions in sports such as cricket, tennis or snooker. With this innovation a range of real time images can be streamed to judges, television viewers or coaching staff. The pure tracking system is combined with a backend database and archiving capabilities so that it is possible to extract and analyse trends and statistics about individual players, games or ball to ball comparisons etc.
Check out hawk-eye in action (against Nadal) in this tennis game:
It is definitely interesting to see new gadgets and technology making their way into sports where so many decisions are flawed due to human errors. Hawk-eye is definitely the way to go – don’t you agree?
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This is pretty neat!