Hawk Eye - The Electronic Referee
Hawk Eye - The Electronic Referee
Hawk Eye - The Electronic Referee
As a fan of many sports including tennis, cricket and football and with the recent development of Hawk-Eye to sort out line calls etc. I thought it would be of interest to write about this British invention and how it came about. As a football fan I have hopes that Goal Line technology will eventually be taken up by Football clubs here in England (Hopefully Sepp Blatter will have left FIFA by then).
In a few days time the World Cup hosting city will be decided for 2018 and 2022 and if England are not awarded the hosting of the World Cup in 2018 then the earliest the cup could come to England will be in 2026 a good 60 years since it was last held in England!!! If this is the case then I think the Premier League should just introduce Goal Line technology and ignore FIFA who are just a bunch of corrupt jumped up plonkers.
Hawk-Eye is a complex computer system used in Cricket, Tennis and other sports to visually track the path of the ball and display a record of its most statistically likely path as a moving image. In some sports, like tennis, it is now part of the adjudication process. It is also used in some instances to predict the future path of a ball in cricket. It was developed by engineers at Roke Manor Research Ltd of Romsey in Hampshire, England, in 2001. A UK patent was submitted by Dr Paul Hawkins and David Sherry. Later, the technology was spun off into a separate company, Hawk-Eye Innovations Ltd., as a joint venture with television production company Sunset + Vine.
All Hawk-Eye systems are based on the principles of triangulation using the visual images and timing data provided by at least four high-speed video cameras located at different locations and angles around the area of play. The system rapidly processes the video feeds by a high-speed video processor and ball tracker. A data store contains a predefined model of the playing area and includes data on the rules of the game.
In each frame sent from each camera, the system identifies the group of pixels which corresponds to the image of the ball. It then calculates for each frame the 3D position of the ball by comparing its position on at least two of the physically separate cameras at the same instant in time. A succession of frames builds up a record of the path along which the ball has travelled. It also "predicts" the future flight path of the ball and where it will interact with any of the playing area features already programmed into the database. The system can also interpret these interactions to decide infringements of the rules of the game.
The system generates a graphic image of the ball path and playing area, which means that information can be provided to judges, television viewers or coaching staff in near real time. The pure tracking system is combined with a back end database and archiving capabilities so that it is possible to extract and analyse trends and statistics about individual players, games, ball-to-ball comparisons, etc.
The technology was first used by Channel 4 during a Cricket test match between England and Pakistan on Lord's Cricket Ground on 21 May 2001. It is used primarily by the majority of television networks to track the trajectory of balls in flight. In the winter season of 2008/2009 the ICC trialled a referral system where Hawkeye was used for referring decisions to the third umpire if a team disagreed with an LBW decision. The third umpire was able to look at what the ball actually did up to the point when it hit the batsman, but could not look at the predicted flight of the ball after it hit the batsman.
Its major use in cricket broadcasting is in analysing leg before wicket decisions, where the likely path of the ball can be projected forward, through the batsman's legs, to see if it would have hit the stumps. Consultation of the third umpire, for conventional slow motion or Hawk-Eye, on leg before wicket decisions, is not currently sanctioned in international cricket and doubts remain about its accuracy in cricket.
Due to its real-time coverage of bowling speed, the systems are also used to show delivery patterns of bowler's behaviour such as line and length, or swing/turn information. At the end of an over, all six deliveries are often shown simultaneously to show a bowler's variations, such as slower deliveries, bouncers and leg-cutters. A complete record of a bowler can also be shown over the course of a match.
Batsmen also benefit from the analysis of Hawk-Eye, as a record can be brought up of the deliveries batsmen scored from. These are often shown as a 2-D silhouetted figure of a batter and colour-coded dots of the balls faced by the batsman. Information such as the exact spot where the ball pitches or speed of the ball from the bowler's hand (to gauge batsman reaction time) can also help in post-match analysis.
The system was also officially introduced to Tennis in the 2006 Hopman Cup in Australia. Now it is used in Tennis, it has become much more exciting and nail biting, as in Cricket..
At the World Snooker Championship 2007, the BBC used Hawk-Eye for the first time in its television coverage to show player views, particularly in the incidents of potential snookers. It has also been used to demonstrate intended shots by players when the actual shot has gone awry. It is now used by the BBC at every World Championship, as well as some other major tournaments. The BBC uses the system sporadically, for instance in the 2009 Masters at Wembley the Hawkeye was at most used once or twice per frame. In contrast to tennis, the Hawkeye is never used in snooker to assist referees' decisions.
In the future the hope is that many other sports will take up the Hawk Eye system such as Baseball, Football (Soccer), Rugby, Hockey (Grass and ice versions) and many other sports.
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Copyright 2010 Paul Hussey. All Rights Reserved.
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