Generation of see-through baseball movie from multi-camera views

Abstract

This paper presents a method of generating new view point movie for the baseball game. One of the most interesting view point on the baseball game is looking from behind the catcher. If only one camera is placed behind the catcher, however, the view is occluded by the umpire and catcher. In this paper, we propose a method for generating a see-through movie which is captured from behind the catcher by recovering the pitcher's appearance with multiple cameras, so that we can virtually remove the obstacles (catcher and umpire) from the movie. Our method consists of three processes; recovering the pitcher's appearance by Homography, detecting obstacles by Graph Cut, projecting the ball's trajectory. For demonstrating the effectiveness of our method, in the experiment, we generate a see-through movie by applying our method to the multiple camera movies which are taken in the real baseball stadium. In the see-through movie, the pitcher can be appeared through the catcher and umpire.