Image recognition: Detecting billiard balls on Android

Question

I am trying to create an android app which can recognize Billiard balls on a pool table in an image coming from the camera. What would be the best approach to do this?

We can assume that the camera and the pool table are in fixed positions, but there could be object other than the balls on the pool table.

I am currently looking into two possible solutions:

1. Vuforia SDK - Simple API for object tracking / recognition, but I couldn't find any information about ball/sphere shape tracking. They have Cylinder and Image target that could possibly be used somehow to track the balls.

2. OpenCV - Seems much richer and steeper learning curve in comparison with Vuforia, but there is some information about Billiard ball detection online (e.g. this, and this).

Are there any addition approaches for solving this problem? What would be the easiest working approach for this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The balls are moving or not? I've used SURF (and SFIT) they work great for arrested objects. Have a look to the documentation page there are also two questions you should see this and this. Than if you want to calculate the trajectory I've tried Pymecavideo that uses OpenCv maybe a look into the source code could be interesting for your work.