Towards automatic video production of staged performances

Abstract:

Professional quality videos of live staged performances are created by recording them from different appropriate viewpoints. These are then edited together to portray an eloquent story replete with the ability to draw out the intended emotion from the viewers. Creating such competent videos typically requires a team of skilled camera operators to capture the scene from multiple viewpoints. In this talk, I will introduce an alternative approach where we automatically compute camera movements in post-production using specially designed computer vision methods.

First, I will explain our novel approach for tracking objects and actors in long video sequences. Second, I will describe how the actor tracks can be used for automatically generating multiple clips suitable for video editing by simulating pan-tilt-zoom camera movements within the frame of a single high resolution static camera. I will conclude my talk by presenting test and validation results on a challenging corpus of theatre recordings and demonstrating how the proposed methods open the way to novel applications for cost effective video production of live performances including, but not restricted to, theatre, music and opera.

Brief Bio:

Vineet Gandhi obtained his B.Tech degree in Electronics and Communication engineering from Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing Jabalpur and a master degree under prestigious Erasmus Mundus Scholarship program. During his masters he studied in three different countries for a semester each specializing in the areas of Optics, image and vision. He did his master thesis in perception team at INRIA France in collaboration with Samsung research. He later joined Imagine team at INRIA as a doctoral researcher and obtained his PhD degree in computer science and applied mathematics.

His current research interests are in the areas of visual learning/detection/recognition, computational photography/videography and sensor fusion for 3D reconstruction. He also enjoys working in the field of optics, colorimetry and general mathematics of signal and image processing.