Coherent video generation for multiple hand-held cameras with dynamic foreground

Abstract

Abstract For many social events such as public performances, multiple hand-held cameras may capture the same event. This footage is often collected by amateur cinematographers who typically have little control over the scene and may not pay close attention to the camera. For these reasons, each individually captured video may fail to cover the whole time of the event, or may lose track of interesting foreground content such as a performer. We introduce a new algorithm that can synthesize a single smooth video sequence of moving foreground objects captured by multiple hand-held cameras. This allows later viewers to gain a cohesive narrative experience that can transition between different cameras, even though the input footage may be less than ideal. We first introduce a graph-based method for selecting a good transition route. This allows us to automatically select good cut points for the hand-held videos, so that smooth transitions can be created between the resulting video shots. We also propose a method to synthesize a smooth photorealistic transition video between each pair of hand-held cameras, which preserves dynamic foreground content during this transition. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, which struggle to preserve dynamic foreground content.

Keywords

• video editing
• smooth temporal transitions
• dynamic foreground
• multiple cameras
• hand-held cameras