Exploration of Player Behaviours from Broadcast Badminton Videos

Abstract

Understanding an opposing player's behaviours and weaknesses is often the key to winning a badminton game. This study presents a system to extract game data from broadcast badminton videos, and visualize the extracted data to help coaches and players develop effective tactics. Specifically, we apply state‐of‐the‐art machine learning methods to partition a broadcast video into segments, in which each video segment shows a badminton rally. Next, we detect players' feet in each video frame and transform the player positions into the court coordinate system. Finally, we detect hit frames in each rally, in which the shuttle moves towards the opposite directions. By visualizing the extracted data, our system conveys when and where players hit the shuttle in historical games. Since players tend to smash or drop shuttles under a specific location, we provide users with interactive tools to filter data and focus on the distributions conditioned by player positions. This strategy also reduces visual clutter. Besides, our system plots the shuttle hitting distributions side‐by‐side, enabling visual comparison and analysis of player behaviours under different conditions. The results and the use cases demonstrate the feasibility of our system.