A novel approach for automatic detection and identification of inappropriate postures and movements of table tennis players

In recent years, developments in the fields of computer vision and artificial intelligence have created new opportunities for studying sports performance. With advancements in computer vision and artificial intelligence, it is now possible to use massive volumes of video data to get deeper insights into sports dynamics, especially in precision-based video sports like table tennis. To develop skills, a thorough examination of player movements is required. With the development of vision-based human posture recognition, computers can function like humans and derive intelligent judgments from outside data. This paper presents a novel method that uses graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) to detect and identify improper postures and movements in table tennis players. In addition to conventional methods, the proposed method dissects the human skeleton into finely detailed head, trunk, and leg features. Deep-level features that offer a more comprehensive understanding of athlete movements are extracted after feeding these features into the network. The softmax classifier combines these features to produce the final recognition result. The effectiveness of this approach has been evaluated through extensive experimentation. The GCN model performs remarkably well, with accuracy rates of 86.4% on the NTU-RGB + D dataset and 79.1% on the COCO dataset. This accomplishment is significant because the model consistently yields accurate detection results, even in complex and occlusion-filled scenes. In comparison tests, the proposed model performs better than GraphSAGE, GAT, ChebNet, GIN, and GC-LSTM in identifying relevant body part movements in table tennis players while ignoring irrelevant ones. According to proposed experiments, this enhances the recognition of improper postures in most table tennis actions.