title: Cinematographic Rules Applied to a Camera Network

authors:

Petr Doubek
D-ITET/BIWI, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Indra Geys
ESAT/PSI-VISICS, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Tomas Svoboda
CMP FEE, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic

Luc Van Gool
D-ITET/BIWI, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
ESAT/PSI-VISICS, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

abstract:

We present a camera network system consisting of several modules of 2-3 low end
cameras attached to one computer. It is not possible for a human to observe all
the information coming from such a network simultaneously. Our system is
designed to select the best viewpoint for each part of the video sequence, thus
automatically creating one real-time video stream that contains the most
important data. It acts as a combination of a director and a cameraman.

Cinematography developed its own terminology, techniques and rules, how to make
a good movie. We illustrate here some of these techniques and how they can be
applied to a camera network, to solve the best viewpoint selection problem.

Our system consists of only fixed cameras, but the output is not constrained to
already existing views. A virtual zoom can be applied to select only a part of
the view. We propose a view interpolation algorithm which makes it possible to
create new intermediate views from the existing camera images.

The combination of all these techniques gathers information from a complete
camera network and produces one attractive real-time video stream. The
resulting video can typically be used for telepresence applications or as a
documentary or instruction video.

[PDF]

---

Program