BallCam! : Dynamic View Synthesis from Spinning Cameras

We place a small wireless camera inside an American football to capture the ball's point-of-view during flight to augment a spectator's experience of the game of football. To this end, we propose a robust video synthesis algorithm that leverages the unique constraints of fast spinning cameras to obtain a stabilized bird's eye point-of-view video clip. Our algorithm uses a coarse-to-fine image homography computation technique to progressively register images. We then optimize an energy function defined over pixel-wise color similarity and distance to image borders, to find optimal image seams to create panoramic composite images. Our results show that we can generate realistic videos from a camera spinning at speeds of up to 600 RPM.

Papers:

Koida Horita, Hideki Sasaki, Hideki Koike, Kris M. Kitani: Experiencing the ball's POV for ballistic sports, Proc. of the 4th Augmented Human International Conference (AH'13), pp.128-133, 2013 (PDF).

Kris M. Kitani, Kodai Horita, Hideki Koike: BallCam!: Dynamic View Synthesis from Spinning Cameras, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2012), poster paper, 2012 (PDF).

Media:

•“A Football's-Eye View.” Wall Street Journal, Week in Ideas. March 8, 2013.

•“Spinning camera gives a ball's-eye view of the game.” New Scientist, 2013.

•“Pa. Student’s Software Captures The Game From The Ball’s Perspective.” CBS Philly, 2013.

•“BallCam Puts Football Fans on the Field.” DesignNews, 2013.

•“Local Students Create Camera Inside Of A Football.” CBS Pittsburgh (KDKA News at 6), 2013.

•“The CMU Ball Cam: Watch any sport from the perspective of the ball.” PopCity Media, 2013.

•“What the World Looks Like From a Football's Point of View.” Popular Mechanics, 2013.

•“Football Physics: Watching the game from the eye of the football.” Physics Central, 2013.

•“BallCam Utilizes Algorithms And GoPro Camera To Provide New Field Of View.” RedOrbit, 2013.

•“U.S. looks to replace human surveillance with computers.” CNET, 2012.

•“Surveillance tech from Carnegie Mellon can watch and predict.” PHYS.ORG, 2012.

•“Scientists Building Security Cameras That Can “See” Crimes Before They Happen.” PetaPixel, 2012.