   #copyright

Hawk-Eye

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Engineering; Sports

   Hawk-Eye is a computer system used in cricket, tennis and other sports
   to track the path of the ball. It was developed in 2001 by Dr. Paul
   Hawkins while working at Roke Manor Research Limited. Later, the
   technology was spun off into a separate company, Hawk-Eye Innovations
   Ltd., as a joint venture with television production company Sunset +
   Vine.

Method

   Hawk-Eye uses six or more television cameras situated at a high level
   around the ground, linked to a computer system. The computer reads in
   the video in real time, and tracks the path of the ball on each camera.
   These six separate views are then combined together to produce an
   accurate 3D representation of the path of the ball, which can be viewed
   in a virtual reality simulation.

Applications in sport

Cricket

   The system was first used by Channel 4 during a Test match between
   Pakistan and England at Lord's Cricket Ground, on 21 April 2001. Since
   then it has been an indispensable tool for commentators. However, the
   system is not used by the umpires to adjudicate on LBW decisions in
   Test cricket or one-day international cricket. It is used primarily by
   the majority of television networks to track the trajectory of balls in
   flight.

   Its major use in cricket is in analysing leg before wicket decisions,
   where Hawk-Eye can project the likely path of the ball forward, through
   the batsman's legs, to see if it would have hit the wicket. Currently
   this information is only visible to television viewers, although it may
   be adopted in the future by the third umpire, who currently sees only
   conventional slow motion replays. Consultation of the third umpire on
   leg before wicket decisions is not currently sanctioned in
   international cricket.

Tennis

   Hawk-Eye has also been used in television coverage of several major
   tennis tournaments, including Wimbledon, the Stella Artois at Queens,
   the Australian Open, the Davis Cup and the Tennis Masters Cup. The US
   Open Tennis Championship announced they will make official use of the
   technology for the 2006 US Open (see, ). It is also used as part of a
   larger tennis simulation implemented by IBM called PointTracker. Along
   with Cyclops and Auto-Ref, it is one of several automated line-calling
   mechanisms used.

   In March 2006, at the Nasdaq-100 Open, Hawk-Eye was used officially for
   the first time at a tennis tour event.

   In 2006 the US Open Tennis Championship became the first grand-slam
   event to use the system during play, allowing players to challenge line
   calls.

   The 2006 Hopman Cup in Perth, Western Australia, was the first
   elite-level tennis tournament where players were allowed to challenge
   point-ending line calls, which were then reviewed by the referees using
   Hawk-Eye technology. It used 10 cameras feeding information about ball
   position to the computers.

   The 2007 Australian Open was the first grand-slam tournament of 2007 to
   implement Hawk Eye in challenges to line calls, where each tennis
   player on Rod Laver Arena was allowed 2 incorrect challenges per set
   and one additional challenge should a tiebreaker be played. In the
   event of an advantage final set, challenges are reset to 2 for each
   player every 12 games i.e. 6 all, 12 all.

   The Hawk-Eye technology was used in the 2007 Dubai Tennis
   Championships. Defending champion Rafael Nadal accused the system of
   incorrectly calling an out ball following his exit. The umpire had
   called a ball out; upon the opposing player challenging the decision,
   Hawkeye said otherwise. (
   http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/4/story.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10426649)

   Hawk Eye has the capability of calling ins and outs live, but it was
   decided to limit it to replays only.

   Hawk-Eye (along with MacCam) was used in 2004 to demonstrate several
   poor calls by chair umpires in the US Open. In Serena Williams'
   controversial quarterfinal loss to Jennifer Capriati, several poor
   calls were contested by Williams. TV replays demonstrated that there
   were actually several crucial calls that were obviously erroneous.
   Though the calls themselves were not reversed, the chair umpire Mariana
   Alves was dismissed from the tournament.

Further developments

   On June 14, 2006, it was announced that the Wisden group had bought
   Hawk-Eye . The acquisition is intended to strengthen Wisden's presence
   in cricket, and allow it to enter tennis and other international
   sports. Hawk-Eye is already working on implementing a system for
   basketball.

   According to Hawk-Eye's website, the system produces much more data
   than that shown on television. This data could easily be shown on the
   Internet. Wisden also owns the cricket website Cricinfo therefore it
   can be speculated that Wisden can incorporate data generated by
   Hawk-Eye to augment the online coverage of cricket by cricinfo.

Trivia

   The use of the Hawk-Eye brand and simulation has been licensed to
   Codemasters for use in the Sony Playstation 2 video game Brian Lara
   International Cricket 2005 to make the game appear more like television
   coverage.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk-Eye"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
