Table Tennis Research

What do we do?

We are a team of researchers at Centrale Lyon (French Engineering School) and LIRIS (Reaserch Laboratory) working on sports data analysis and visualization to improve athletes performances. We focus on various sports, from swimming to table tennis, in close collaboration with athletes and coaches. Our approach is the following:

Data Collection - we gather data from various sources, with a focus on video footage, but also experiment / benchmark tracking devices (e.g. Motion capture, IMUs) and publicly available datasets.
Exploratory Data Analysis - we calculate and visualize exploratory statistics, data distributions to create visual dashboard so we can better grasp the collected data properties (and quality) to create models and new statistics.
Data Visualization - we also build custom, advanced visualizations to help us understand complex data patterns and trends from collected data and statistics. We also use visualization to communicate our findings to athletes and coaches.

As a research group our activity is centered as follows:

Publishing research academic publications in sports-specific venues (e.g. MLSA workshop) but also general Vis/HCI (IEEE Vis, EuroGraphics, CHI).
Developing tools and methods for data collection and analysis.
Collaborating with other researchers and institutions in the field of sports analytics.
Disseminating our findings through conferences, workshops, and online platforms.

Fête de la science and a working session with students at Centrale Lyon.

People

Team:

Romain Vuillemot (Assistant professor, Centrale Lyon, LIRIS) principal investigator
Aymeric Erades (PhD student, Centrale Lyon, LIRIS)

Collaborators: Pierre Ripoll, Sylvain Lesage, Marc Plantevit, Céline Robardet, Pierre-Etienne Martin, Anais Servais, Christophe Hurter, Riad Attou, Marin Mathé, Lou Peuch, Thomas Papon, Pierre-Etienne Martin, Gabin Calmet, Pierre Duluard, Xinqing Li.

Publications

Aymeric Erades. Visual Analysis of Tactics in Table Tennis, PhD Thesis, Centrale Lyon, 2025. Video

Aymeric Erades, Romain Vuillemot. How Camera Angle Impact Table Tennis Ball Bounce Tracking. Sports Physics, 2025.

Riad Attou, Marin Mathé, Aymeric Eradès, Romain Vuillemot. Analysis of Service Returns in Table Tennis 12th Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (ECML/PKDD 2025), Sep 2025, Porto, Portugal.

Aymeric Erades, Romain Vuillemot. Player-Centric Shot Maps in Table Tennis. Computer Graphics Forum, 2025, pp.10.

Aymeric Erades, Lou Peuch, Romain Vuillemot. Investigating Control Areas in Table Tennis. Sixteenth International EuroVis Workshop on Visual Analytics (EuroVA), Jun 2025, Luxembourg, France.

Aymeric Erades, Thomas Papon, Romain Vuillemot. Characterizing Serves in Table Tennis. Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics, Sep 2024, Vilnius (Lituanie), Lithuania.

Aymeric Erades, Anais Servais, Christophe Hurter, Romain Vuillemot. Un design space de vidéos augmentées de matches de tennis de table. Journée Visu, 2024.

Aymeric Erades, Pierre-Etienne Martin, Romain Vuillemot, Boris Mansencal, Renaud Péteri, Julien Morlier, Stefan Duffner, Jenny Benois-Pineau. SportsVideo: A Multimedia Dataset for Sports Event and Position Detection in Table Tennis and Swimming. MediaEval 2023 Workshop collocated with MMM 2024, Feb 2024, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Gabin Calmet, Aymeric Erades, Romain Vuillemot. Exploring Table Tennis Analytics: Domination, Expected Score and Shot Diversity. Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics, Sep 2023, Turin, Italy.

Aymeric Erades, Romain Vuillemot. Visual Analysis of Table Tennis Game Tactics. Journée VISU 2023.

Pierre Duluard, Xinqing Li, Marc Plantevit, Céline Robardet, Romain Vuillemot. Discovering and Visualizing Tactics in a Table Tennis Game Based on Subgroup Discovery. ECML/PKDD 2022 Workshop, Grenoble, France, 2022.