Selecting Promising Junior Swimmers in Egypt Using Automated Biometric Algorithms of Image Processing and Fuzzy Concepts

Abstract

Modern sports need a great physical and psychological effort from young athletes to reach high performance levels. Stature length, leg length, foot length, arm length, hand length, shoulder width, hip width, chest width and weight are the anthropometric characteristics that affect swimmers' performances. This paper introduces new techniques to select promising junior swimmers in Egypt. It develops two automated algorithms to select junior swimmer depending on their anthropometric measurement. The first technique uses Canny filter to develop the first algorithm, while the second one uses the Fuzzy concepts. The proposed algorithms make use of the image processing technique to handle the anthropometric measurements, by detecting the human body feature points automatically from the front and side images. The 101 feature points extract automatically from 36 human body measurements, while swimming games needs only 8 body dimensions from these 36 human body measurements. Therefore, the proposed system is not limited to swimming sports but can also be applied to other sports. Moreover, the experimental results and the corresponding statistical analysis show the high accuracy and advantages of the proposed algorithms. The first algorithm improved the results that could have obtained using the well-known fully vision-based automatic human body method by 22.23%, 15.9%,29.41%, and 27.5%, for stature length, arm length, leg length, and shoulder width, respectively. Also, it gave the best results for Leg Length, and Shoulder width, while the second one yielded the best result for Stature Length.