Experiencing the Ball’s POV for Ballistic Sports - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Experiencing the Ball’s POV for Ballistic Sports

Kodai Horita, Kris M. Kitani, Hideki Sasaki, and Hideki Koike
Conference Paper, Proceedings of 4th Augmented Human International Conference (AH '13), pp. 128 - 133, March, 2013

Abstract

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 tech- nique 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.

BibTeX

@conference{Horita-2013-7677,
author = {Kodai Horita and Kris M. Kitani and Hideki Sasaki and Hideki Koike},
title = {Experiencing the Ball’s POV for Ballistic Sports},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 4th Augmented Human International Conference (AH '13)},
year = {2013},
month = {March},
pages = {128 - 133},
keywords = {Digital Sports, BallCam, Video Synthesis, Image Stitching},
}