Optical Observation for Body Angles of Cricket Players’ Motion to Identify the Batting Shots

Cricket, one of the world’s most popular sports, has developed considerably during the past few decades. The competition and complexity of this sport increased largely during the past few years, which brought the attention of the researchers to develop technical solutions to improve the quality of the sport by improving both the on-field decision-making and practicing methods. There are several kinds of high-end equipment available in the market that can be used to improve these skills. Even though such equipment can be used at the national level, it is very difficult to use them at school and club levels due to their higher cost. This research focused on enhancing the batting skills of cricket batsmen using a low-cost setup that uses webcams to capture the footage and the MediaPipe library, which was developed by Google to analyze motion data. This research analyzed two cricket shots, the front foot defence, and the pull shot, using four web cameras. The received footage was analyzed using MediaPipe to identify the variations in the angles of the player’s left elbow and left shoulder while playing the shot. These pattern identifications can help successfully understand the angle variation of the forward foot defence and the pull shots by generating an average angle value graph using four web cameras. These graphs show the special patterns for each batting shot. This methodology and the results are valuable for developing a successful player analyzing system by considering the other important cricket shots at a very low cost with affordable 2D web cameras.