The HAWKEYE Technology

In the past few decades, skepticism about umpiring follies hasn’t abated. In the world of sports, where stakes are increasing by every passing minute and an erroneous line-call can mean change of fortunes, there is an increasing reliance on technology to ensure that all arbitrations are unbiased.

The HAWKEYE is one of the most commonly used technologies in the game of cricket today. It has been put to a variety of uses, such as providing a way to collect interesting statistics, generate very suggestive visual representations of the game play and even helping viewers to better understand the umpiring decisions, especially in the case of LBWs. While the system provides for things which we see everyday on television, there is very impressive technology going into it, which many of us are oblivious to. In this paper, we attempt to explain how the technology works, in detail.

1 Introduction:

The game of cricket has attained great commercial importance and popularity over the past few years. As a result, there has been felt a need to make the game more interesting for the spectators and also to try and make it as fair as possible. The component of human error inmaking judgments of crucial decisions often turns out to be decisive. It is not uncommon to see matches turning from being interesting to being one sided due to a couple of bad umpiring decisions. There is thus a need to bring in technology to try and minimize the chances of human error in such decision making. Teams across the world are becoming more and more professional with the way they play the game. Teams now have official strategists and technical support staff which help players to study their past games and improve. Devising strategies against opponent teams or specific players is also very common in modern day cricket. All this has become possible due to the advent of

technology. Technological developments have been harnessed to collect various data very precisely and use it for various purposes. The HAWKEYE is one such technology which is considered to be really top notch in cricket. The basic idea is to monitor the trajectory of the cricket ball during the entire duration of play. This data is then processed to produce life like visualizations showing the paths which the ball took. Such data has been used for various purposes, popular uses including the LBW decision making software and colorful wagon wheels showing various statistics. This paper attempts to explain the intricate details of the technology which goes behind the HAWKEYE. We first start off with a general overview of the system and an outline of the challenges that we might face, then move on to the details of the technology and end with various applications where one sees this technology being put to use.

2 HAWKEYE – a general overview:

Cricket is a ball game played within a predetermined area. A system comprising of video cameras mounted at specific angles can be used to take pictures. These pictures are then used to locate the position of the ball. The images are then put together and superimposed on a predetermined model to form a complete visualization of the trajectory of the ball. The model includes, in this case, the pitch, the field, the batsmen and fielders etc. For this to be possible, we need to sample images at a very high rate and thus need efficient algorithms which can process data in real time. Such technologies are widely used today in various sports such as Tennis, Billiards which also fall in the category of ball games played within a restricted area. Our discussion will mostly contain applications which specific to the game of cricket, however in some cases, we will mention how similar techniques are applied in other games. There are various issues which crop up when one tries to design and implement such a system. In the game of cricket, the general issues are:

1. The distance at which the cameras see the pitch and the ball are dependant on the dimensions of each ground and can vary greatly.

2. Just the individual images don’t help too much; for the system to be of practical use, one must ensure that it can track the 3D trajectory of the ball with high precision. In order to get this accuracy, the field of view of each camera should be restricted to a small region this means one needs more cameras to get the coverage of the entire field.

3. Fielders and spectators might obstruct the camera’s view of the ball and the ball might get ‘lost’ in its flight in one or more of the cameras. The system should be robust enough to handle this, possibly by providing some redundancy.

4. The ball might get confused with other similar objects – for instance, with flying birds or the shadow of the ball itself. The image processing techniques used need to take care of these issues. Luckily, there are techniques which are easy to implement and are well known to the Image Processing community on the whole, to take care of these.

5. To help in judging LBW calls, the system needs to be made aware of the style of the batsman – whether he is right or left handed. This is because the rules of LBW are dependant on the position of the stumps and are not symmetrical about the middle stump. Thus, the system needs to detect whether a particular ball has pitched outside the leg stump of a batsman or not.

6. To determine the points at which the ball makes contact with the pitch, the batsmen or other objects is very hard. This is because we don’t really know these spots beforehand and the model and the real pictures taken by cameras need to be merged to give such a view.