Evgeni Chasnovski has some fun counting:
On May 7th 2020 Dan made a successful attempt to beat a world record for the longest duration to control a table tennis ball with a bat. He surpassed current record duration of 5h2m37s by 18 minutes and 27 seconds for a total of 5h21m4s. He also live streamed the event on his “TableTennisDaily” YouTube channel, which later was uploaded (important note for the future: this video is a result of live stream and not a “shot and uploaded” one). During cheering for Dan in real time I got curious about actual number of bounces he made.
And thus the quest begins.
As counting manually is error-prone and extremely boring, I decided to do this programmatically. The idea of solution is straightforward: somehow extract audio from the world record video, detect bounces (as they have distinctive sound) and count them.
Click through for the process as well as a link to a Git repo with the Python code.