Camera placement optimization for sports filming

Abstract

With the rise of high-quality and affordable video cameras, it has never been more accessible to record and broadcast live amateur sports games. However, to maintain a decent viewing angle of the field and its players, one must continuously adjust their camera's orientation to follow the players. While there have been several commercial products that give sports teams equipment and software to record their games with higher quality and convenience, these technologies are usually proprietary and quite expensive. Therefore, we propose a solution to utilize the existing lighting poles around a sports field for mounting cameras. In this way, sports teams and field managers can utilize low-cost hardware to record games. Additionally, this offers the opportunity for a permanent fixture of cameras around the field that can be readily available whenever a game takes place. To this end, this paper investigates how to find the ideal placement of cameras on lighting poles to best capture a nearby field in the following two scenarios. (i) Single-camera scenario: when the properties of a pinhole camera such as focal distance, sensor dimensions, and image resolution are known, the camera's projection quadrilateral on the field can be calculated. Based on this, we optimize the camera's height and elevation angle based on a desired ground sampling distance. (ii) Multi-camera scenario: when the properties of multiple cameras are known, we optimize camera placement to either capture the same field area from different views or to capture different areas of the field for greater coverage. To showcase the potential application of these optimization methods, we have implemented them into a web-based simulator that can run in almost any browser (source code available at https://github.com/figuedj1/SportsFilmingOptimization). When a user inputs their camera and field specifications, they are not only given both a 2D and 3D view of the field and environment but also methods for optimizing each camera's orientation and placement.