Experiencing the ball's POV for ballistic sports

Abstract

We place a small wireless camera inside an American football to capture the ball's point-of-view during flight to augment a spectator's experience of the game of football. To this end, we propose a robust video synthesis algorithm that leverages the unique constraints of fast spinning cameras to obtain a stabilized bird's eye point-of-view video clip. Our algorithm uses a coarse-to-fine image homography computation technique to progressively register images. We then optimize an energy function defined over pixel-wise color similarity and distance to image borders, to find optimal image seams to create panoramic composite images. Our results show that we can generate realistic videos from a camera spinning at speeds of up to 600 RPM.