Counting competitive jump rope events from video using computer vision

Competitive jump rope has exploded in popularity since I started competing back in 2004. Back then, there were murmurs of the possibility of 200 jumps in 30 seconds (the common sprint event) and most national champions were winning with scores of ~160 Now, the current record is ~236…clearly at nearly 8 jumps a second, this is not humanly possible to count in real time. In fact, in a competition we can only count one foot and then rely on doubling the score to get the true count! For years, a dream in the sport was a system for automatically counting these events. Solutions using devices attached to jumpers can work, but a minimally invasive system from raw video is much preferred.

Inspired by the success of RepNet in general repetition counting, we were able to achieve nearly 100% accuracy in counting and ranking competitors from multiple national and world championships held virtually during the COVID pandemic.

This work was awarded the Outstanding Demo Award at CVPR 2023.

We are currently working to integrate this fully into the competitive jump rope community to accelerate the growth of competitions around the world.