Measuring ball speed and height above the net in table tennis

We developed a protocol for recording and automatic offline measurements of table tennis ball height above the net and its speed in laboratory conditions. The protocol includes aligning the high speed camera with the net, calibrating it using the chessboard pattern, and then recording the game at the rate of 1000 fps followed by the offline video processing. We recorded 40 sets played by players of different skills, one top European, two top national, one middle-ranked and one low- ranked national player, resulting in 3 TB of video data. The results show strong correlation between the player skills and both measured parameters.