Robot Film Crew Knows What Sports Fans Like
Posted by Chris Benjamin in New tech Feb 22nd, 2010 | no responsesSPORTS fans need never miss a match again, thanks to software that could automatically film games and so allow broadcasters to cover them more cheaply by losing camera crew.
Dubbed the Autonomous Production of Images based on Distributed and Intelligent Sensing (APIDIS), the system combines the video stream from several cameras, says Christophe De Vleeschouwer at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), in Belgium.
Tracking a ball across various video streams is relatively easy, says De Vleeschouwer, but viewers also want to see what the players are up to. So APIDIS aims for a shot of the action that is a compromise between focusing on the ball and wider views of the pitch by tracking the ball and players simultaneously, calculating which camera captures the most detail (Computer Vision and Image Understanding, DOI: 10.1016/j.cviu.2010.01.005).
APIDIS can be tailored to viewers’ demands, says De Vleeschouwer, by giving preference to shots containing particular players, for example. It has been tested on several basketball matches, a game chosen because of its fast pace. The resulting footage was good enough to attract interest from the US sport broadcaster ESPN, claims De Vleeschouwer.
APIDIS could also be useful for surveillance, when it could track groups of people on CCTV networks, says De Vleeschouwer.
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