A comparative study of free-viewpoint video techniques for sports events

Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of free-viewpoint video techniques applied to the problem of virtual view synthesis in sports events. A consideration of errors in the synthesis pipeline is presented along with a taxonomy of these errors and a framework for evaluating the quality of view synthesis when compared to ground truth. Three reconstruction techniques are evaluated, billboarding, shape from silhouette and view-dependent shape from silhouette. View-dependent rendering is used for virtual view synthesis. It is shown that currently the shape from silhouette technique provides the best completeness, while the view-dependent shape from silhouette technique provides the best appearance.