Technologies- Hot spot

The recent innovation used in cricket claims to be 100% effective in detecting edges ! It is basically used in Channel 9's cricket coverage.. It was first used in the Ashes series in Australia. It uses infrared camera technology to determine whether a batsman has made contact with a delivery, and if so, which part of his bat or body made contact.

Two powerful thermal-imaging cameras are positioned above the field of play, behind the bowler's arm at either end of a ground. These can remotely sense and measure the minute amount of heat generated by the impact of a cricket ball against another object. Computer technology then generates a negative image on which the point of contact is highlighted as a red friction "hot spot" for a second or two. HotSpot doesn't only record impacts between the ball and other objects, but also the bat hitting a pad or the ground.
So any impact is spotted as a white dot / white line on the bat or pad or the human body.. So it perfectly tells the commentators (so far, hopefully umpires in the future) whether the batsman is out or not and they can go gaga over it.. HotSpot is therefore useful in instances of bat-pad impacts in determining whether the ball hit bat or pad first and if implemented can reduce a lot of human errors.

HotSpot uses technology developed in the military for tank- and jet-fighter tracking. The technology was adapted for television by BBG Sports, the Australian company responsible for the Snickometer, in conjunction with Sky Sports. Channel Nine producer Steve Crawley described HotSpot as "100% backed up by science", as opposed to other applications. 




Hot Spot has particular advantage of over it competing technology, the Snickometer which is a sound-detection based system. Snickometer often produces inconclusive results indicating contact (potentially any combination of bat, pad and ball) only, whereas the Hot Spot clearly show exactly what the ball strikes.




In short, it is a good technology that is used only by the channel 9.. It would be good if the other broadcasters also use it.. IF (IF) the ICC are serious about introducing technology to reduce human errors in umpiring decisions, then instead of wasting time with referrals and hawk eyes, they can implement HotSpot.. This is surely less ambiguous than hawk eyes that are used in the referral system now..