Orbital Table Tennis Serving System: A Face Detection-driven Approach

Table tennis serving (TTS) machine can effectively reduce the burden of coach and improve the training effect. However, most of the existing TTS systems are generally fixed on the table to serve the balls, and they are pre-programmed and lack of flexibility. To address above problems, we develop an orbital TTS system, which can flexibly move with the human body. Specifically, an improved face detection method is designed to track the human position by introducing the attention mechanism. Moreover, a single branch connection is adopted to reduce the running memory requirement, and a multi-threading scheme is employed to reduce the computing time. Practical experiments show that the developed TTS system has a better flexibility and a higher serving ball quality.