Practitioner’s guide to the state of computer vision’s applications in biomechanics

Visual observation of an athlete’s motion lies at the core of sports biomechanics. For decades, biomechanists have used photographic, videographic, and opto-reflective motion capture methods combined with an array of digitisation and analysis procedures. Whatever the tools, the aim is always the same: to quantify the motion of the underlying skeleton. This is no mean feat, and so our procedures typically involve applying surface markers on the athlete’s skin, pre-capture calibration steps, painstaking manual digitisation and data cleaning, or expensive and sophisticated equipment. As a result,...