Dynamic View Synthesis from Camera in Spinning Ball

Abstract

We placed a small wireless camera inside an American football to capture the ball's view during flight to augment the spectator's experience when watching American football. To this end, we propose a robust video synthesis algorithm that leverages the unique constraints of fast spinning cameras to obtain a stable bird's-eye-view video clip. Our algorithm uses coarse-to-fine image homography computation to progressively register images. We then optimized the 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.