06-05-2011, 10:17 AM
In the 1970s, the world hockey champions had a coach who inspired them by insisting that they start every match, by imagining they were 0-3 down.
“A goal for your weaknesses, another for your opponent’s strengths and a third for umpiring errors.”
In the past few decades, skepticism about umpiring follies hasn’t abated. In the world of sports,
where stakes are increasing by every passing minute and an erroneous line-call can mean change
of fortunes, there is an increasing reliance on technology to ensure that all arbitrations are
unbiased.
The HAWKEYE is one of the most commonly used technologies in the game of cricket today. It
has been put to a variety of uses, such as providing a way to collect interesting statistics, generate
very suggestive visual representations of the game play and even helping viewers to better
understand the umpiring decisions, especially in the case of LBWs. While the system provides
for things which we see everyday on television, there is very impressive technology going into it,
which many of us are oblivious to. In this paper, we attempt to explain how the technology
works, in detail.
1 Introduction:
The game of cricket has attained great commercial importance and popularity over the past
few years. As a result, there has been felt a need to make the game more interesting for the
spectators and also to try and make it as fair as possible. The component of human error in making judgments of crucial decisions often turns out to be decisive. It is not uncommon to see
matches turning from being interesting to being one sided due to a couple of bad umpiring
decisions. There is thus a need to bring in technology to try and minimize the chances of human
error in such decision making.
Teams across the world are becoming more and more professional with the way they play the
game. Teams now have official strategists and technical support staff which help players to study
their past games and improve. Devising strategies against opponent teams or specific players is
also very common in modern day cricket. All this has become possible due to the advent of
technology. Technological developments have been harnessed to collect various data very
precisely and use it for various purposes.
The HAWKEYE is one such technology which is considered to be really top notch in cricket. The
basic idea is to monitor the trajectory of the cricket ball during the entire duration of play. This
data is then processed to produce life like visualizations showing the paths which the ball took.
Such data has been used for various purposes, popular uses including the LBW decision making
software and colorful wagon wheels showing various statistics. This paper attempts to explain
the intricate details of the technology which goes behind the HAWKEYE. We first start off with a
general overview of the system and an outline of the challenges that we might face, then move
on to the details of the technology and end with various applications where one sees this
technology being put to use.
Download full report
http://sangramraje.110mbfiles/HawkEye-Paper.pdf