Badminton

Today at a Badminton match or competition, coaches face challenges to capture, monitor, and advise players in real-time on game progress, points, and player errors. In some cases, coaches have to attend to different players, playing simultaneously in adjacent courts. It becomes a real challenge to note their observations and rely on their memory to catch up with the player(s); advise them on what to correct, and win points from the opponent based on the analysis.

BWF development team teamed with Bahrain Polytechnic (BP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) at their Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) to develop and launch a real-time dashboard as an aid for coaches to enhance players’ performance during the match. Using the AI-based solution will enable the coach on his/her Tablet/laptop to utilize a custom dashboard that is linked to the cameras in the field that streams data, concurrently capturing the match in progress. This setup will help the coach receive and analyse relevant data and advise the players on their performance, winners, and errors in real-time to change tactics and techniques during the match swiftly. The data can also be retrieved after the match in the form of a report which represents a summary of the main events in the match.

The opportunity for this solution is to improve the feedback the coaches can have from the matches. Coaches missing critical points of the match is very troublesome and can cause the coach to give inaccurate feedback to the players when it happens. Implementing an AI-powered solution allows the coach to catch any movement or landing more accurately, as well as other metrics. The solution avails important match data that is always available to the coach or the players themselves. And because of that, the coach’s feedback can be more accurate and more impactful to the player’s future performance.

On the day of the match, the coach will set up the cameras around the court and connect them to the online dashboard. Once done, the coach will register a new match per court. The coach will input the date, starting times and the player’s name. Once the coach hits the start button, the cameras will start capturing information about the match and that information will be displayed on the dashboard in real time. The coach will start monitoring the game and rely on the solution to record all the necessary match information. Before the coaching break, the coach can use the data collected on the dashboard to get a quick analysis of the player performance which allows him to provide better advice to the player. After the match ends, the coach can access the finished matches on the dashboard or the coach can export the match data for further analysis and performance review of the players.

Utilizing AWS cloud and other advanced technologies, the CIC team deployed four cameras at each corner of a badminton court which captures a variety of information about the match. The information then sent to the cloud and stored on DynamoDB, and then it is presented on an online dashboard developed on Amazon Insights Analytics tools. The dashboard shows the field divided into six areas/blocks in a 2D heatmap. The solution first shows how many times the shuttlecock landed in that specific area/block. The dashboard will also show the sequence, count, and times the shuttlecock landed in the relevant area/block. In addition, player’s position information is being monitored. Using this approach, the coach can very quickly get up to speed on the recent updates in the match which helps him deliver the right advice to the coach during the coaching break. The Player and shuttlecock movements are captured by a set of Deeplens cameras running a deep learning SSD Resnet-50 model. The Deeplens will forward collected information to a lambda function by using the API gateway service. The lambda function is responsible for pre-processing the data and then adding it to an RDS database using SQL queries. The website, which is hosted on an Elastic beanstalk is created using Laravel which is a PHP framework that simplifies development. Finally, the website is being updated with live information using an AJAX engine.

Ben Butler, AWS Global CIC leader, said, “I am very proud of the level of engagement and knowledge and skills this prototype brought to the country and proud of working with BWF and the intelligent Bahraini students at our CICs.”
David Cabello, Chair of Development at BWF, expressed how much he was proud to team with BP and AWS CIC, who came up with innovative ideas to produce worldwide impact.