psdirector: An automatic director for watching view generation from panoramic soccer video

Abstract

Watching TV or Internet video is the most common way for people perceiving soccer matches. However, it is immature to generalize this mean to amateur soccer, as it is expensive to direct a match professionally by human. As an alternative, using multiple cameras to generate a panoramic video can faithfully record the match, but with bad watching experience. In this work, we develop a psDirector system to address this dilemma. It takes the panoramic soccer video as input and outputs a corresponding watching view counterpart, which continuously focuses on attractive playing areas that people are interested in. The task is somewhat unique and we propose a novel pipeline to implement it. It first extracts several soccer-related semantics, i.e., soccer field, attractive ROI, distribution of players, attacking direction. Then, the semantics are reasonably utilized to produce the outputted video, where important match content, camera action as well as their consistency along the time axis are carefully considered to ensure the video quality. Experiments on school soccer videos show rationality of the proposed pipeline. Meanwhile, psDirector generates video with better watching experience than an existing commercial tool.