Automatic Camera Selection and PTZ Canvas Steering for Autonomous Filming of Reality TV

Abstract

Reality TV shows that follow people in their day-to-day lives are not a new concept. However, the traditional methods used in the industry require a lot of manual labor and need the presence of at least one physical camera man. Because of this, the subjects tend to behave differently when they are aware of being recorded. This paper presents an approach to follow people in their day-to-day lives, for long periods of time (months to years), while being as unobtrusive as possible. To do this, we use unmanned cinematographically-aware cameras hidden in people's houses. Our contribution in this paper is twofold: First, we create a system to limit the amount of recorded data by intelligently controlling a video switch matrix, in combination with a multi-channel recorder. Second, we create a virtual camera man by controlling a PTZ camera to automatically make cinematographically pleasing shots. Throughout this paper, we worked closely with a real camera crew, enabling us to compare the results of our system to the work of trained professionals. This work was originally published in MVA 2017, as T. Callemein, W. Van Ranst and T. Goedemé, "The Autonomous hidden Camera Crew".