Efficient optical camera tracking in virtual sets

Abstract—Optical tracking systems have become particularly popular in virtual studios applications tending to substitute electromechanical ones. However, optical systems are reported to be inferior in terms of accuracy in camera motion estimation. Moreover, marker-based approaches often cause problems in image/video compositing and impose undesirable constraints on camera movement. Present work introduces a novel methodology for the construction of a two-tone blue screen, which allows the localization of camera in three-dimensional (3-D) space on the basis of the captured sequence. At the same time, a novel algorithm is presented for the extraction of camera’s 3-D motion parameters based on 3-D-to-two-dimensional (2-D) line correspondences. Simulated experiments have been included to illustrate the performance of the proposed system. Index Terms—Camera motion estimation, line correspondences, optical tracking systems, primitive polynomials, virtual sets, virtual studios. I