Panoramic video capturing and compressed domain virtual camera control

Abstract

A system for capturing panoramic video and a novel method for corresponding compressed domain virtual camera control is presented. It targets applications such as classroom lectures and video conferencing. The proposed method is based on the FlyCam panoramic video system that is designed to produce high resolution and wide-angle video sequences by stitching the video pictures from multiple stationary cameras. The panoramic video sequence is compressed into an MPEG-2 stream for delivery. The proposed method integrates region of Interest (ROI) detection, tracking, and virtual camera control, and works on compressed domain information only. It first detects the ROI in the P (predictive coded) picture using only the macroblock type information, It then up-samples this detection result to obtain the ROI of the whole video stream. The ROI is tracked using a Kalman filter. The Kalman filter estimation results are used for virtual camera control that simulates human controlled video recording. The system has no physical camera motion and the virtual camera parameters are readily available for video indexing. The proposed system has been implemented for real time processing.