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Playing Table Tennis is fun but some automation can make it a bit more fun. Taylor Pritchard, Pol Rosello and Frank Xie just completed this Automated Table Tennis Score Keeper for their ECE 5760 Final Project. The project uses a Altera DE2-115 FPGA to monitor for the ball color to watch the game play and score accordingly.
“We use a Sony Handycam DCR-DVD108 as the camcorder to monitor the table tennis game. The NTSC video feed of the camera was used as an input to the DE2-115, where it was split into YCbCr components to isolate the green content of each frame. The luma component of each frame (Y) was not taken into account in order to allow for flexibility in the lighting of each frame. Thresholds for the blue and red component (Cb and Cr, respectively) were determined experimentally to match the color of the green balls. In order to reduce the influence of noise from other green objects in the room, we spray painted the balls a neon green color to ensure the color of the balls was distinct, much like green screen technology used in film and television.”