High Quality Video-shooting System for Dynamic Sport Games by Super-speed Tracking

Summary

Broadcasting contents of sport games (e.g. the FIFA World Cup, the Olympic games etc.) have been quite popular. Hence, high-quality and powerful videos are highly demanded. However, it is often hard for camera operators to keep tracking their camera's direction on a dynamic object such as a particular player, a ball, and so on. In such cases, shootable method has been limited to either moving the camera's gaze slowly with wide angle of view, or controlling the gaze not accuratly but based on a prediction and adopting some parts which are shot well by chance. Super slow and close-up videos of the remarkable player or the ball are thought to be especially quite valuable. However, camera operators have not been able to do that.

To solve this issue, we developped "high quality video-shooting system for dynamic sport games by super-speed tracking" that can track a high-speed dynamic object using image processing and record a high image quality movie. It is realized by a high-speed optical gaze controller, Saccade Mirror and 1000-fps high-speed image processing. The Saccade Mirror controls a camera's gazing direction not by moving the camera itself but by rotating two-axis small galvanometer mirrors. It takes no more than 3.5 ms even if it controls the gaze by 60 deg, the widest angle, for both pan and tilt. The newest prototype system accesses a Full HD image quality for an actual broadcasting service.

A configuration of the system is shown in Fig.1. A result of shooting a pingpong game using the system is also shown in Fig.2. The ball in the game always can been seen at the center of the each image. In this time, we envision the system for a broadcasting service of a sport game, but also expect recording detail dynamics of a flying bird, an insect, a car, an aircraft, and so on.

Fig.1 A configuration of the system.	Fig.2 A result of shooting a pingpong game.

Movie

References

1. Kohei Okumura, Hiromasa Oku and Masatoshi Ishikawa: High-Speed Gaze Controller for Millisecond-order Pan/tilt Camera, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2011) (Shanghai, 2011.5.12) / Conference Proceedings, pp.6186-6191 [PDF (1.3MB)]^*IEEE