Kinect Based Virtual Referee For Table Tennis Game: TTV (Table Tennis Var System)

Today's game quality is more affected by referee decisions. The history shows that the error in a referee's decision may change the whole result of a game. It seems to rely on just the referee's decision and always combines with the errors. This fact is even bolded in important games like the World Cup or Olympics which may cause the rank of the team, players, etc. Recently, to solve this problem, the new concept of VAR (video assistant referee) has been introduced and had also been hired during the football World Cup match 2018. Even some methods like video check-ins in volleyball games or bypass signal in Swordsmanship (sword fighting) long back was used. But still, so many demand games are missed. Statistically, almost approximately 8 hundred million people are playing table tennis in the world but due to the ball speed in this game which sometimes increases up to 69.9 miles per hour (112.4931 km/h) which brings the limitation to hire and use the VAR systems. In this research paper, a novel VAR system (TTV system) based on Kinect and Raspberry pi has been presented. The main aspect of this design is to have a portable system which can be used for any type of LCD system and help the referees to count the ball better during the game to have a more qualified game. In the proposed TTV algorithm, the two methods of contour and depth are merged to have better ball detection. The experiment results in showing the proposed algorithm and systems success in real game and its ability to implement in the real game which has not been reported before.