BlurBall: Joint Ball and Motion Blur Estimation for Table Tennis Ball Tracking

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Gossard, Thomas, Radovic, Filip, Ziegler, Andreas, Zell, Andreas
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Gossard, Thomas
Radovic, Filip
Ziegler, Andreas
Zell, Andreas
author_facet Gossard, Thomas
Radovic, Filip
Ziegler, Andreas
Zell, Andreas
contents Motion blur reduces the clarity of fast-moving objects, posing challenges for detection systems, especially in racket sports, where balls often appear as streaks rather than distinct points. Existing labeling conventions mark the ball at the leading edge of the blur, introducing asymmetry and ignoring valuable motion cues correlated with velocity. This paper introduces a new labeling strategy that places the ball at the center of the blur streak and explicitly annotates blur attributes. Using this convention, we release a new table tennis ball detection dataset. We demonstrate that this labeling approach consistently enhances detection performance across various models. Furthermore, we introduce BlurBall, a model that jointly estimates ball position and motion blur attributes. By incorporating attention mechanisms such as Squeeze-and-Excitation over multi-frame inputs, we achieve state-of-the-art results in ball detection. Leveraging blur not only improves detection accuracy but also enables more reliable trajectory prediction, benefiting real-time sports analytics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_18387
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BlurBall: Joint Ball and Motion Blur Estimation for Table Tennis Ball Tracking
Gossard, Thomas
Radovic, Filip
Ziegler, Andreas
Zell, Andreas
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Motion blur reduces the clarity of fast-moving objects, posing challenges for detection systems, especially in racket sports, where balls often appear as streaks rather than distinct points. Existing labeling conventions mark the ball at the leading edge of the blur, introducing asymmetry and ignoring valuable motion cues correlated with velocity. This paper introduces a new labeling strategy that places the ball at the center of the blur streak and explicitly annotates blur attributes. Using this convention, we release a new table tennis ball detection dataset. We demonstrate that this labeling approach consistently enhances detection performance across various models. Furthermore, we introduce BlurBall, a model that jointly estimates ball position and motion blur attributes. By incorporating attention mechanisms such as Squeeze-and-Excitation over multi-frame inputs, we achieve state-of-the-art results in ball detection. Leveraging blur not only improves detection accuracy but also enables more reliable trajectory prediction, benefiting real-time sports analytics.
title BlurBall: Joint Ball and Motion Blur Estimation for Table Tennis Ball Tracking
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18387