Inertial Detection of Ball-Racket Contacts in Padel Match Play: Towards Non-Visual Match Analysis

Details

Supervisors

Sadre, Ramin ; Pelsser, Cristel

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences informatiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enIn the context of the growing interest in padel, this thesis investigates event detection for padel using a racket-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU). The long-term motivation is to support future automatic match analysis or scoring systems, but the evaluated scope is limited to detecting ball-racket contacts during amateur match play. A dedicated racket-mounted IMU recording system was developed to collect continuous padel recordings. The data was synchronized with video and annotated to build a reference dataset of ball-racket contacts, other racket actions, and labels indicating whether contacts occurred during rallies or between points. The IMU method was formulated as a three-stage cascade: detecting short impact segments in the continuous signal, classifying these segments as ball-racket contacts or other racket actions, and classifying detected contacts as occurring during active play or between points. On the test partition, the first-stage detection retained 99.1% of reference in-play hits. After the full cascade, 89.5% of these hits were recovered as final in-play predictions, with 94.9% precision and 0.122 false in-play predictions per minute. These results indicate that a racket-mounted IMU can provide useful timestamped evidence for in-play ball-racket contacts in continuous amateur padel recordings.