Chapter International Standardization of FTV

FTV (Free-viewpoint Television) is visual media that transmits all ray information of a 3D space and enables immersive 3D viewing. The international standardization of FTV has been conducted in MPEG. The first phase of FTV is multiview video coding (MVC), and the second phase is 3D video (3DV). The third phase of FTV is MPEG-FTV, which targets revolutionized viewing of 3D scenes via super multiview, free navigation, and 360-degree 3D. After the success of exploration experiments and Call for Evidence, MPEG-FTV moved MPEG Immersive project (MPEG-I), where it is in charge of video part as MPEG-I Visual. MPEG-I will create standards for immersive audio-visual services

The kindest cut: Enhancing the user experience of mobile tv through adequate zooming

The growing market of Mobile TV requires automated adaptation of standard TV footage to small size displays. Especially extreme long shots (XLS) depicting distant objects can spoil the user experience, e.g. in soccer content. Automated zooming schemes can improve the visual experience if the resulting footage meets user expectations in terms of the visual detail and quality but does not omit valuable context information. Current zooming schemes are ignorant of beneficial zoom ranges for a given target size when applied to standard definition TV footage. In two experiments 84 participants were able to switch between original and zoom enhanced soccer footage at three sizes - from 320x240 (QVGA) down to 176x144 (QCIF). Eye tracking and subjective ratings showed that zoom factors between 1.14 and 1.33 were preferred for all sizes. Interviews revealed that a zoom factor of 1.6 was too high for QVGA content due to low perceived video quality, but beneficial for QCIF size. The optimal zoom depended on the target display size. We include a function to compute the optimal zoom for XLS depending on the target device size. It can be applied in automatic content adaptation schemes and should stimulate further research on the requirements of different shot types in video coding

An Overview of Multimodal Techniques for the Characterization of Sport Programmes

The problem of content characterization of sports videos is of great interest because sports video appeals to large audiences and its efficient distribution over various networks should contribute to widespread usage of multimedia services. In this paper we analyze several techniques proposed in literature for content characterization of sports videos. We focus this analysis on the typology of the signal (audio, video, text captions, ...) from which the low-level features are extracted. First we consider the techniques based on visual information, then the methods based on audio information, and finally the algorithms based on audio-visual cues, used in a multi-modal fashion. This analysis shows that each type of signal carries some peculiar information, and the multi-modal approach can fully exploit the multimedia information associated to the sports video. Moreover, we observe that the characterization is performed either considering what happens in a specific time segment, observing therefore the features in a "static" way, or trying to capture their "dynamic" evolution in time. The effectiveness of each approach depends mainly on the kind of sports it relates to, and the type of highlights we are focusing on

New visual coding exploration in MPEG: Super-MultiView and free navigation in free viewpoint TV

ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG have recently jointly issued a new multiview video compression standard, called 3D-HEVC, which reaches unpreceded compression performances for linear,dense camera arrangements. In view of supporting future highquality,auto-stereoscopic 3D displays and Free Navigation virtual/augmented reality applications with sparse, arbitrarily arranged camera setups, innovative depth estimation and virtual view synthesis techniques with global optimizations over all camera views should be developed. Preliminary studies in response to the MPEG-FTV (Free viewpoint TV) Call for Evidence suggest these targets are within reach, with at least 6% bitrate gains over 3DHEVC technology

SoccER: Computer graphics meets sports analytics for soccer event recognition

Automatic event detection from images or wearable sensors is a fundamental step towards the development of advanced sport analytics and broadcasting software. However, the collection and annotation of large scale sport datasets is hindered by technical obstacles, cost of data acquisition and annotation, and commercial interests. In this paper, we present the Soccer Event Recognition (SoccER) data generator, which builds upon an existing, high quality open source game engine to enable synthetic data generation. The software generates detailed spatio-temporal data from simulated soccer games, along with fine-grained, automatically generated event ground truth. The SoccER software suite includes also a complete event detection system entirely developed and tested on a synthetic dataset including 500 minutes of game, and more than 1 million events. We close the paper by discussing avenues for future research in sports event recognition enabled by the use of synthetic data

Virtual camera synthesis for soccer game replays

International audienceIn this paper, we present a set of tools developed during the creation of a platform that allows the automatic generation of virtual views in a live soccer game production. Observing the scene through a multi-camera system, a 3D approximation of the players is computed and used for the synthesis of virtual views. The system is suitable both for static scenes, to create bullet time effects, and for video applications, where the virtual camera moves as the game plays