Looking for Company to Develop Integrated Shot Distance System

[Lou_M_]

I am the information technology director for one of the premier golf associations.  We are looking for a development firm to assist us with the development of a shot distance application that can:

1.  Integrate with our existing scoring system that provides real-time statistics to our media partners.

2.  Provide distance from the ball to the cup for shots on the green.

3.  Provide drive distances from tee to fairway.

Interested parties should reply to this forum topic and start a dialog.  We hope to have a contract in place for a pilot system in 21  (August 6, 2015) days.

[MartyG]

Whilst I'm not an expert on the use of RealSense for depth analysis (others on this forum are better at that), I thought I would answer with some thoughts and move the post back up to the top of the forum in the process so that others who had missed your message might have a chance to reply.

I am guessing that the kind of application you are seeking to develop is similar to the Opta real-time data system used in football / soccer?

http://www.optasports.com/

Given the limited tracking distance of the camera: since you cannot attach a camera directly to a golf ball to collect data as it travels whilst keeping the ball in tracking range, I would say that the most likely way to implement it would be to analyze live video footage of the ball's travel across the fairway and use image "segmentation" (something that RealSense supports) to isolate the ball from the video footage and track it as an object.

The camera could also segment the cup as a separate object to track the segmented ball's travel towards it.

You might get more accurate data if you built a virtual model of the fairway and used the live segmentation data to move a virtual ball across the digital fairway, enabling you to see the ball's path much more clearly.  This would also be an interesting visual feature for media partners.

[samontab]

Instead of this camera, I would use a 3D Lidar based solution to solve this problem. This is because the distance that you want to measure is probably going to be larger than the maximum distances that this camera can obtain.

[Ian_M_1]

I think for the fairway shots and distances, you may be better off using a GPS based system. This camera wouldn't give the distance data, but there are are systems such as the Foresight GC2 which could give tracking data.  On the green an image processing system would be straightforward; the distances and pin positions could all be precalibrated.