Portable and Feasible Device to Evaluate the Technique of Swimming Practitioners

Based on people’s enthusiasm for swimming and their pursuit of swimming skill at a higher level, this paper proposes a non-contact motion guidance system based on optical motion capture technology, which aims to improve their swimming technique conveniently, scientifically and quickly. The swimming actions can be captured using one smartphone underwater, and the app on the phone will process the video and give suggestions based on the reference postures derived from statistics of professional swimmers for improvement of the swimming performance. In this system, the Canny operator was applied to detect the edge of the image captured from the swimming video, and the Hough line was implemented to recognize and locate the key position information which refers to the angle between knee and hip joints, and the angle between the trunk and horizontal plane. Furthermore, by comparing the key position information with the data of standard swimming, improvement measures can be given to improve the swimming skills of swimmers. As the result of the experiments, the system can accurately capture the swimmer’s movement state, locate the incorrect posture of the swimmer, and provide the corrective information in real-time. Although the paper only took breaststroke as an example, the proposed method can be extended to the other swimming styles.