Measurement of initial motion of a flying golf ball with multi-exposure images for screen-golf

Recently, realistic sports games have been one of the growth industries of the indoor entertainment field. In particular, screen-golf, which is played indoors with real golf clubs and balls, has shown an outstanding growth rate in South Korea. It consists of a sensor, a computer graphics engine, an interior, and other elements. The sensor is the most essential component among them. It measures the initial conditions of a flying golf ball, the velocity, the horizontal angle, and the vertical angle. Until 2008, most commercialized products were infrared LED type sensors, but these are associated with relatively low accuracy and a narrow measurement range compared to those that utilize a camera. In spite of the better performance, camera-based screen-golf sensors are not broadly employed in the screen-golf market because they remain expensive compared with other screen-golf sensors. In this study, a new type of camera-based sensor system that captures multi-exposure images and ball tracking algorithms are suggested. These measure the initial condition of a flying golf ball from captured images. The suggested system was verified in an environment equal to that of a real screen-golf store.