Flying sports assistant: external visual imagery representation for sports training

Abstract

Mental imagery is a quasi-perceptual experience emerging from past experiences. In sports psychology, mental imagery is used to improve athletes' cognition and motivation. Eminent athletes often create their mental imagery as if they themselves are the external observers; such ability plays an important role in sport training and performance. Mental image visualization refers to the representation of external vision containing one's own self from the perspective of others. However, without technological support, it is difficult to obtain accurate external visual imagery during sports. In this paper, we have proposed a system that has an aerial vehicle (a quadcopter) to capture athletes' external visual imagery. The proposed system integrates various sensor data to autonomously track the target athlete and compute camera angle and position. The athlete can see the captured image in realtime through a head mounted display, or more recently through a hand-held device. We have applied this system to support soccer and other sports and discussed how the proposed system can be used during training.