A high accuracy automatic timing method for photo finish systems

In this paper we proposed a high accuracy automatic timing method for photo finish systems, as manual detection is subjective and time-consuming. Athlete objects are detected and extracted automatically, effective interferences elimination algorithm is proposed for torso locating and finish line detection. The effectiveness of this method is verified by 2511 samples from 390 track events' original image data, and it achieved the accuracy of 82.07% within a tolerance of 2 ms time error. The experiment results show the objectivity and accuracy.