Injury assessment during sporting collisions requires estimation of the associated kinematics. While marker-based solutions are widely accepted as providing accurate and reliable measurements, the setup times are lengthy and it is not always possible to outfit athletes with restrictive equipment in sporting situations. A new generation of markerless motion capture based on deep learning techniques holds significant promise for enabling measurement of movement in the wild. The aim of the current work is to evaluate the performance of a popular deep learning model "out of the box" for human pose estimation on a staged rugby tackle dataset of ten staged tackle movements performed in a marker-based motion capture laboratory with a system of three high-speed video cameras. An analysis of the discrepancy between joint positions estimated by the marker-based and markerless systems shows that the deep learning approach performs acceptably well in most instances, although high errors exist during challenging intervals of heavy occlusion and self-occlusion. In total, 75.6% of joint position estimates are found to have a mean absolute error (MAE) of less than or equal to 25 mm, 17.8% have an MAE between 25 and 50 mm and 6.7% have an MAE greater than 50 mm. The mean per joint position error is 47 mm.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.