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A comment on Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots. Parent comment

Re:Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots by SoapSeller on Tuesday June 12, 2012 @01:20PM (#4101546)
Not the NBA, but some teams use a system called SportVU[0] that do auto player&ball tracking.

I used to work on the system, so I can answer (some) questions about it.

[0] http://www.sportvu.com/basketball.asp

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Re:Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots by hammock on Tuesday June 12, 2012 @01:26PM (#4101592)
How does it work?
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Re:Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots by SoapSeller on Tuesday June 12, 2012 @02:17PM (#4101889)
Short version: Using a number(six) of dedicated video cameras around the venue and (a lot of) image processing.

There is a nice article in wired about it(include a picture of one of the cameras and the view from another) http://www.wired.com/playbook/2011/04/nba-data-revolution/al...

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Re:Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots by jevinskie on Tuesday June 12, 2012 @03:02PM (#4102133)
How is the system calibrated? Are the cameras at fixed angles or mounted to a base that measures their angles?
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Re:Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots by SoapSeller on Tuesday June 12, 2012 @03:25PM (#4102265)
The angles are important, but also the position relatively to the court(which is different in every venue).

The calibration is done by matching(automatically or manually) known world points to pixels from the cameras. (This is a very common practice in image-processing systems)

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Re:Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots by statictype on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @01:25AM (#4104454)
Teams can install these cameras in their own arenas. Are they allowed to install it when their team plays in opposing arenas? Do they have to negotiate with various team owners for this?
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Re:Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots by SoapSeller on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @03:37PM (#4107981)
Unfortunately - they can't. There is a continues effort(by the company own the tech, and by the teams that are currently using it) to make it a standart in the league. At least in the previous season there was a sharing agreement between the teams that use the system(all the teams get all the data).
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