Club Head Tracking : Visualizing the Golf Swing with Machine Learning

Abstract: During the broadcast of a golf tournament, a way to show the audience what a player's swing looks like would be to draw a trace following the movement of the club head. A computer vision model can be trained to identify the position of the club head in an image, but due to the high speed at which professional players swing their clubs coupled with the low frame rate of a typical broadcast camera, the club head is not discernible whatsoever in most frames. This means that the computer vision model is only able to deliver a few sparse detections of the club head. This thesis project aims to develop a machine learning model that can predict the complete motion of the club head, in the form of a swing trace, based on the sparse club head detections. Slow motion videos of golf swings are collected, and the club head's position is annotated manually in each frame. From these annotations, relevant data to describe the club head's motion, such as position and time parameters, is extracted and used to train the machine learning models. The dataset contains 256 annotated swings of professional and competent amateur golfers. The two models that are implemented in this project are XGBoost and a feed forward neural network. The input given to the models only contains information in specific parts of the swing to mimic the pattern of the sparse detections. Both models learned the underlying physics of the golf swing, and the quality of the predicted traces depends heavily on the amount of information provided in the input. In order to produce good predictions with only the amount of input information that can be expected from the computer vision model, a lot more training data is required. The traces predicted by the neural network are significantly smoother and thus look more realistic than the predictions made by the XGBoost model.