Classification and legality analysis of bowling action in the game of cricket

Abstract

One of the hot topics in modern era of cricket is to decide whether the bowling action of a bowler is legal or not. Because of the complex bio-mechanical movement of the bowling arm, it is not possible for the on-field umpire to declare a bowling action as legal or illegal. Inertial sensors are currently being used for activity recognition in cricket for the coaching of bowlers and detecting the legality of their moves, since a well trained and legal bowling action is highly significant for the career of a cricket player. After extensive analysis and research, we present a system to detect the legality of the bowling action based on real time multidimensional physiological data obtained from the inertial sensors mounted on the bowlers arm. We propose a method to examine the movement of the bowling arm in the correct rotation order with a precise angle. The system evaluates the bowling action using various action profiles. The action profiles are used so as to simplify the complex bio-mechanical movement of the bowling arm along with minimizing the size of the data provided to the classifier. The events of interest are identified and tagged. Algorithms such as support vector machines, k-nearest neighbor, Naïve Bayes, random forest, and artificial neural network are trained over statistical features extracted from the tagged data. To accomplish the reliability of outcome measures, the technical error of measurement was adopted. The proposed method achieves very high accuracy in the correct classification of bowling action.