Swimmer Stroke Rate Estimation From Overhead Race Video

TL;DR

This paper presents a system that automatically estimates swimmer stroke rates from overhead race videos, enabling detailed swimming performance analysis from common competition footage.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel automated system for extracting swimmer stroke rates from overhead race videos, applicable to various types of competition footage.

Findings

System successfully estimates stroke rates from diverse overhead videos

Applicable to live streams, broadcasts, and camera footage with or without motion

Enhances swimming analytics with automated, scalable data extraction

Abstract

In this work, we propose a swimming analytics system for automatically determining swimmer stroke rates from overhead race video (ORV). General ORV is defined as any footage of swimmers in competition, taken for the purposes of viewing or analysis. Examples of this are footage from live streams, broadcasts, or specialized camera equipment, with or without camera motion. These are the most typical forms of swimming competition footage. We detail how to create a system that will automatically collect swimmer stroke rates in any competition, given the video of the competition of interest. With this information, better systems can be created and additions to our analytics system can be proposed to automatically extract other swimming metrics of interest.