What makes Federer look so elegant?

Everyday we come across thousands of sportsmen in action. Each of them have their own style of play and make varied impressions on the viewers. Despite this expected variability in the impression they make, there are certain inherent qualities of their play like their poise, the economy of their movement, flow of their movement etc. which make some of them more watchable to most of us. For example in tennis, Federer is widely regarded as the one of the most elegant players in the history. In cricket, the upright stance, the perfect balance, the precision in shot-making are some of the qualities which makes Sachin Tendulkar look more ’elegant’or ’better’ than others. In this project, we wish to the measure the ‘watchability’ of a player by quantifying the quality of the various movements of a player. In particular, we concentrate mainly on the movements of a batsman in cricket and provide principled ways to measure the ‘watchability’ of a batsman in terms of the three typical movements of a batsman, viz stance, back-lift and follow-through. ‘Watchability’ scores can be very useful for a qualitative video summarization of sports videos, analyzing the change in style of a single players play over the course of a long career, or even to determine the amount of influence of one players style on another.