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The success of a professional athlete depends quite strongly on the assessment and active improvement of his or her technique. In the field of competitive swimming, a quantitative evaluation is highly desirable to supplement the typical qualitative analysis. However, quantitative (manual) evaluations are very time consuming and therefore only used in individual cases.

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In a joint project with the Institute of Applied Training Science in Leipzig (Institut für angewandte Trainingswissenschaften, IAT), we are developing a system for detecting a swimmer in a swimming channel and continuously estimating his or her pose in order to capture (inner-)cyclic structures and derive kinematic parameters for a biomechanical analysis. Human pose recovery in aquatic environments faces a lot of challenges, from heavily cluttered fore- and background to partial occlusion.

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The purpose of this work is two-fold: firstly, we are developing a robust method for accurately detecting individual key poses with specifically trained object detectors. The procedure is fully automatic and retrieves stroke frequency, stroke length and inner-cycle intervals. Secondly, we optimize our approach in terms of time consumption through algorithmic optimizations, parallelization and GPU programming, allowing for real time application of our system.

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The following video (in German) explains the process of key-frame extraction for the assessment of a swimmer's technique:?[ Video ]

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For more information please contact? Dan Zecha.

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References:

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• Dan Zecha, Christian Eggert, Rainer Lienhart.
  Pose Estimation for Deriving Kinematic Parameters of Competitive Swimmers.
  Computer Vision Applications in Sports, part of IS&T Electronic Imaging 2017.?Burlingame, California, January 2017.?[ PDF ]
• Dan Zecha and Rainer Lienhart.?
  Key-Pose Prediction in Cyclic Human Motion.
  IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision 2015 (WACV 2015).?Waikoloa Beach, HI, January 6-9, 2015?[ PDF ]
• Dan Zecha, Thomas Greif, and Rainer Lienhart.?
  Swimmer Detection and Pose Estimation for Continuous Stroke Rate Determination.?
  Multimedia Content Access: Algorithms and Systems VI, part of IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 23 January 2012, Burlingame, California, USA.
  Also Technical Report 2011-13, 新万博体育下载_万博体育app【投注官网】 of Augsburg, Institute of Computer Science, July 2011.?[ PDF]?[ Video ]
• Dan Zecha and Rainer Lienhart.?
  Bestimmung intrazyklischer Phasengeschwindigkeiten von Schwimmern im Schwimmkanal mittels vollautomatischer Videoanalyse.?
  Technical Report 2014-04, 新万博体育下载_万博体育app【投注官网】 of Augsburg, Institute of Computer Science, July 2014.?[ PDF ]