Racket sports such as table tennis involve a wide range of three-dimensional complex spatial movements of the human body and the racket. Novice players might benefit from the evaluation of the motion profile of the racket to facilitate better adoption of more expert movement. Computer-based evaluation of such novice vs. expert play behavior characteristics includes reducing the required multiple human interactions and easy applicability for subsequent automation to accurately differentiate the motion profile of a novice player from that of an expert. This study has, for the first time, applied the widely used support vector machine (SVM) classification technique for the development of a table tennis player movement evaluation model. The model was trained using an existing dataset of displacements and velocities from various important anatomical landmarks across the body and points on the racket. These were obtained and evaluated for table tennis forehand strokes for two subgroups of expert and novice ability levels, respectively. Different combinations of variables were selected for model input from the same dataset with the outcomes being noted for each. The resulting SVM classification model exhibited good/noteworthy performance (>90>90% accuracy) in distinguishing racket motion between expert and novice players.
