Estimating a Baseball Hitter’s Bat Speed Using One Camera

Peyton Greve completed his Master’s of Engineering thesis in Computer Science.

Abstract

The speed a hitter swings a baseball bat has become more and more popular among the baseball analytics community. Determining a player’s bat speed not only can tell you how fast a player can swing but also would allow you to measure how hard player’s can hit the baseball. Bat speed is very difficult to measure without attaching any tool to the bat as the task takes multiple camera angles from precise distances from the hitter. This thesis presents a method to develop a tool that can estimate the bat speed of a swing captured by a single camera as video. This thesis also shows the success a regression model can have on a synthetic dataset of swings as proof of concept.

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