Some previous studies have made use of depth
sensors such as ”Microsoft Kinect” for analyzing hu-
man motions (Oikonomidiset al., 2011; Shotton et al.,
2011). These sensors also have limitations, however,
on items such as sensor-target distance and illumina-
tion conditions. As a result, analyzing the motions of
athletes in actual game situations is a still challenging
problem.
We aim at developing a human motion analysis
method that is completely non-intrusive, i.e., requir-
ing neither special device nor body-fitting cloth, thus
making it suitable for use in actual game situations.
The motion history image (MHI) approach, which
was proposed by Bobick and Davis (Bobick and
Davis, 1996; Bobick and Davis, 2001), is acknowl-
edged as a motion analysis and representation method
that is robust against capturing environments. Each
pixel value of an MHI represents a temporal distance
from the latest motion detected at the pixel. Bright
pixels denote pixels in which motions are detected,
and with the elapse of time following the most recent
motions, the pixels become dark. As a result, the MHI
resembles an afterimage. The degree of to which pix-
els become dark is controlled by a decay parameter.
A lot of MHI-based motion representation and
detection studies have been carried out. For exam-
ple, gradient information is used for enhancing sen-
sitivity of both pose and directional motion informa-
tion (Bradski and Davis, 2002), motion history vol-
umes, which is an extension of the input from 2D
image to 3D volume data, was proposed as a free-
viewpoint motion representation (Valstar et al., 2004),
and multilevel intervals for MHI creation was pro-
posed to overcome self-occlusion problem (Weinland
et al., 2006). The most important advantage of the
MHI approach is its robustness under various captur-
ing environments. In addition, MHI-based motion de-
tection can be applied to an image sequence without
any calibrations.
In the context of motion detection in sports,
Mikami et al. used MHI for detecting pitching scenes
from baseball videos. In (Mikami et al., 2007), a ref-
erence pitching motion is represented by an MHI, and
then pitching motions in the target video are retrieved
by the reference motion. This method detects pitching
motions with high accuracy. However, it is not able to
analyze the temporal development of motions.
To the best of our knowledge, temporal develop-
ment of motion is not targeted by MHI-based mo-
tion analysis. This paper proposes a sequential multi-
decay MHI matching process that includes two im-
portant improvements over existing MHI template
matching approaches. First, the proposed method
newly introduces a temporal sequence of MHIs to rep-
resent a reference motion. By comparing a reference
MHI sequence with MHIs from the target video, it
simultaneously detects and analyzes the motion. Its
use of sequential reference MHIs enables to analyze
differences in temporal development among the mo-
tions.
Second, the method extends existing MHI to in-
clude multiple decay parameters. This compensates
for the innate problem of sequential matching. The
reference motion sequence includes both quick and
slow motions. A small decay parameter for quick mo-
tion yields an MHI with many bright pixels, which
deteriorates the spatial resolution of analysis. On the
other hand, a large decay parameter for slow motion
may yield an MHI with no or only a few motion his-
tory, which also deteriorates detection accuracy. Con-
sequently, no one predefined decay parameter can be
the best one. If the MHI-based method is to be ex-
tended to include sequential MHI matching, it must
be able to handle variations in motion speed.
In this paper, we use pitching motions in a base-
ball game as the target of analysis. Our method can be
more widely applied, however, to analyzing repetitive
motions such as tennis serves and golf swings.
The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-
lows. Section 2 reviews the MHI method. Section 3
proposes a temporal MHI sequence matching process.
Section 4 shows experimental results and Section 5
concludes the paper with a summary of key points.
2 MOTION HISTORY IMAGE:
MHI
The MHI approach, a method of motion represen-
tation proposed by Bobick and Davis (Bobick and
Davis, 1996; Bobick and Davis, 2001), has been
widely used because of its ease of implementation.
Many studies to enhance the method have been car-
ried out, as well as many studies using MHI as a
motion representation methods have been carried out.
Since these have been well described in the literature
(Ahad et al., 2012), we will introduce only the basic
idea and implementation of the MHI, here.
Figure 1 shows an MHI and snapshots of the cor-
responding image sequence shown from left to right
in time order. In the MHI, the value of each pixel
shows how recently a motion was detected on the
pixel. Bright (white) pixels denote pixels at which
motions are detected. With the elapse of time follow-
ing the most recent motion, the pixels turn dark.
The pixel value of MHI, H(x, y, t) at position (x, y)
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