Fast Ball Detection Method for Ping-Pong Playing Robots

Ping-pong ball detection plays an important role in the vision system of ping-pong playing robots. In the paper, we present a fast ball detection method for ping-pong playing robot. A reasonable searching region is proposed based on the ping-pong table and the prediction of the ball´s current position. Five key points are used to detect the ball in our method to meet the ping-pong ball´s high speed. Because we use points to the ping-pong ball instead of the ball´s region, the process of the detection can be finished during one scanning, which greatly increases the detecting speed. Experimental results verify the feasibility and the efficiency of our method.