Golden Score

Personal engagement

Judo is a big part of my life.

I come from a line of Mongolian wrestlers hailing from the Arkhangai province of Mongolia. I started training judo wrestling at 15. My achievements include:

1st Dan black belt earned by completing a line-up (defeating 5 competitors in a row) at the famous Budokwai dojo of London (2018).
Bronze medal at the British National Championships in the -100kg category (2021).
Coaching license by the British Judo Association (2022).

In this project, I pay homage to just one of judo's many fascinating qualities: beauty.

Golden Score

Motivation

Judo is an elegant style of combat. With a masterful technique, a judoka can instantly floor their opponent with control and grace.

However, mastering a technique, especially to a point where it works against other high-level judokas, is incredibly difficult. Therefore, when world and Olympic champions score with their techniques against other world class athletes, the moment is truly golden. In those moments, the judokas exhibit expressions of the human body that are bolder than the boldest of dances.

In our Golden Score project, we aimed to capture the beauty therein.

The main source of inspiration for this project was the 4DREPLAY technology introduced for the first time in the 2019 Judo World Championships.

Project story

We aimed to capture 3D models of judo scenes from a single image (or a few images). Therefore, we experimented with existing 3D-reconstruction and human body reconstruction techniques to no avail. Problematically, the poses in judo were too rare and challenging for the existing techniques.

In response, we devised a methodology consisting of novel techniques to overcome the challenges. Our techniques allow greater control over human body pose optimization. You can see our techniques and results here.

Golden Score was a BSc thesis project at King's College London. This project was awarded the Alan Fairbourn Memorial Prize for the Most Meritorious Final Year Project by King's College London.

The findings were also presented at EuroGraphics 2022 in Reims, France.

Acknowledgement

It is my highest privilege to have been granted creative control over the most important project of my (undergraduate) university studies. I thank my co-author and supervisor Dr. Rita Borgo for making this project possible.

Email: munkhtulga.battogtokh@kcl.ac.uk