Hundreds of millions of people use their smartphone video cameras as a convenient and easy way to take spontaneous videos of friends, family or special events.
But few people know how devilishly hard it is to get your smartphone to automatically and hands free analyze 30 frames a second of video live during the game, when there are a million pixels in each frame. SmartPitch has to automatically identify the handful of pixels that show up as the baseball even though many other images in the video are also moving: fielders; base runners; trees or the crowd in the background; the pitcher's hand, arm and glove; the batter's hands and arms and the bat.
And to make this even harder, smartphones record video images very differently when the ball and field are in the sun than when it is cloudy or the ballfield is shady. And very differently early in the morning versus high noon versus late afternoon and early evening.
We have invested thousands of hours testing and fine-tuning the complex and sophisticated SmartPitch software to handle all these situations. We have added new features so that the app will still "see" the ball and measure the speed, exit velocity and launch angle in many different lighting conditions.
The result is the SmartPitch "Lighting Wizard" just rolled out in the Android app.
