Be your own cameraman

Abstract

High-resolution panoramic video with a wide field-of-view is popular in many contexts. However, in many examples, like surveillance and sports, it is often desirable to zoom and pan into the generated video. A challenge in this respect is real-time support, but in this demo, we present an end-to-end real-time panorama system with interactive zoom and panning. Our system installed at Alfheim stadium, a Norwegian premier league soccer team, generates a cylindrical panorama from five 2K cameras live where the perspective is corrected in real-time when presented to the client. This gives a better and more natural zoom compared to existing systems using perspective panoramas and zoom operations using plain crop. Our experimental results indicate that virtual views can be generated far below the frame-rate threshold, i.e., on a GPU, the processing requirement per frame is about 10 milliseconds.