Algorithm predicts the next shot in tennis

QUT researchers have developed an algorithm that can predict where a tennis player will hit the next ball by analysing Australian Open data of thousands of shots by the top male tennis players. Dr Simon Denman, a Senior Research Fellow with the Speech, Audio, Image and Video Technology Laboratory, said the research into the match play of Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer could lead to new ways for professional tennis players to predict their opponent's moves or virtual reality games offering the chance to go head-to-head with world's best players in an accurate but artificial grand slam. Dr Denman is part of a team of QUT researchers, including PhD student Tharindu Fernando, Professor Sridha Sridharan and Professor Clinton Fookes, all from the Vision and Signal Processing Discipline at QUT, who created the algorithm for predicting the next shot in tennis using Hawk-Eye data from the 2012 Australian Tennis Open, provided by Tennis Australia. The researchers narrowed their focus to study just the shot selection of Djokovic, Nadal and Federer because they had the complete data to input into the system on how the players' shot selection changed as the tournament progressed. The researchers analysed more than 3400 shots for Djokovic, nearly 3500 shots for Nadal and almost 1900 shots by Federer, adding context for each shot such as whether it was a return, a winner or an error.