notjulietxd/golf-ball-tracker

Golf Ball Tracker for Mobile Phone Camera

A lightweight, real-time golf ball detection and tracking model optimized for mobile deployment.

Model Overview

• Architecture: YOLOv8-nano (3M parameters, 8.1 GFLOPs)
• Training Data: 559 real ball images + 500 synthetic golf ball images
• Test Performance: mAP50 = 81.2%, mAP50-95 = 58.6%
• Formats: PyTorch (.pt), ONNX (.onnx)
• Input Size: 640x640
• Target FPS: ~30 FPS on modern mobile devices (via ONNX Runtime or TFLite)

Use Cases

• Golf shot analysis: Track ball flight from tee to landing
• Swing coaching: Visual feedback on ball trajectory
• Mobile golf apps: Real-time ball tracking using phone camera
• Driving range: Automated ball flight recording

Mobile Deployment

iOS (CoreML)

from ultralytics import YOLO
model = YOLO("best.pt")
model.export(format="coreml", imgsz=640)

Android (TFLite)

from ultralytics import YOLO
model = YOLO("best.pt")
model.export(format="tflite", imgsz=640, int8=True)

Cross-Platform (ONNX Runtime)

import onnxruntime as ort
session = ort.InferenceSession("best.onnx")
# Use session for inference on any platform

Quick Start

from ultralytics import YOLO

# Load model
model = YOLO("best.pt")

# Detect golf balls in an image
results = model("golf_shot.jpg")
results[0].show()

# Track ball across video frames
for frame in video_stream:
    results = model.track(frame, persist=True)
    # results[0].boxes.xywh provides bounding boxes

Tracking Pipeline

For full trajectory tracking with Kalman filtering and ballistic prediction, see golf_ball_tracker.py:

from golf_ball_tracker import GolfBallTracker

tracker = GolfBallTracker("best.onnx")
tracker.track_video("input.mp4", "output_tracked.mp4")

The tracker includes:

• YOLO detection: Finds golf ball in each frame
• Kalman filtering: Smooths trajectory, handles missed detections
• Ballistic prediction: Predicts flight path when ball is occluded or too small
• Trajectory history: Stores last 100 positions for visualization

Dataset

The model was trained on:

1. Zenodo Accurate Balls Detection dataset (559 images of various sports balls)
2. 500 synthetic golf ball images with varied:
   • Backgrounds (sky, grass, golf course, indoor, dark)
   • Ball sizes (4-40 pixels radius, simulating distance)
   • Motion blur (0-5 levels, simulating high-speed flight)
   • Brightness variations (0.4-1.7x)
   • Noise and lighting changes

Training Recipe

from ultralytics import YOLO

model = YOLO("yolov8n.pt")
model.train(
    data="golf_ball.yaml",
    epochs=5,           # Short training (CPU-friendly)
    imgsz=640,
    batch=4,
    device="cpu",
    augment=True,
    mosaic=1.0,
    scale=0.5,          # Critical for small object detection
    hsv_h=0.015,
    hsv_s=0.7,
    hsv_v=0.4,
)

Key insights for golf ball detection:

• High-resolution features (640x640 input)
• Heavy scale augmentation (balls appear at different distances)
• Motion blur augmentation (golf balls move at 150+ mph)
• Brightness variation (white ball against sky/grass)

Performance Tips for Mobile

1. Use 320x320 input for 4x faster inference (small accuracy trade-off)
2. Quantize to INT8 for 2-4x speedup on mobile NPUs
3. Frame skipping: Run detection every 3rd frame, interpolate between
4. ROI tracking: After initial detection, only search nearby region
5. Hardware acceleration: Use NNAPI (Android) or CoreML (iOS)

Limitations

• Model trained on mixed sports ball data (football, etc.) + synthetic golf balls
• Real golf ball flight data would improve performance significantly
• Small balls at extreme distances (>100 yards) may be challenging
• Motion blur at very high speeds may reduce detection rate
• Night/low-light conditions not specifically trained

Citation

@software{golf_ball_tracker,
  title = {Golf Ball Tracker for Mobile Phone Camera},
  author = {ML Intern},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/notjulietxd/golf-ball-tracker}
}

License

Apache-2.0

Generated by ML Intern

This model repository was generated by ML Intern, an agent for machine learning research and development on the Hugging Face Hub.

• Try ML Intern: https://smolagents-ml-intern.hf.space
• Source code: https://github.com/huggingface/ml-intern

Usage

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_id = 'notjulietxd/golf-ball-tracker'
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id)

For non-causal architectures, replace AutoModelForCausalLM with the appropriate AutoModel class.