Spherical Camera Ball

We proposed a spherical camera ball and its image processing algorithm, designed to provide a ball's point of view (POV) for spectating of ball sports. The proposed spherical camera ball has six cameras embedded at fixed intervals around the surface of the ball. One of the main issues for such ball-type cameras is that the device is spinning and therefore it is hard to obtain stable video stream from such spinning cameras. This paper proposed automatic selection of cameras using matching scores between the anchor frame and current frame. The resultant movie will then always shows the point of interest within the frame. We then applied image translation to obtain a pseudo straight view in which the point of interest is always shown in the center of the frame.

Papers:

Ryohei Funakoshi, Yoji Okudera, and Hideki Koike: Synthesizing Pseudo Straight View from A Spinning Camera Ball, 7th Augmented Human International Conference (AH'16), Geneva, ACM, pp.30:1- 30:4, 2016 (PDF)