Show me where the action is!

Abstract

Reality TV shows have gained popularity, motivating many production houses to bring new variants for us to watch. Compared to traditional TV shows, reality TV shows have spontaneous unscripted footage. Computer vision techniques could partially replace the manual labour needed to record and process this spontaneity. However, automated real-world video recording and editing is a challenging topic. In this paper, we propose a system that utilises state-of-the-art video and audio processing algorithms to, on the one hand, automatically steer cameras, replacing camera operators and on the other hand, detect all audiovisual action cues in the recorded video, to ease the job of the film editor. This publication has hence two main contributions. The first, automating the steering of multiple Pan-Tilt-Zoom PTZ cameras to take aesthetically pleasing medium shots of all the people present. These shots need to comply with the cinematographic rules and are based on the poses acquired by a pose detector. Secondly, when a huge amount of audio-visual data has been collected, it becomes labour intensive for a human editor retrieve the relevant fragments. As a second contribution, we combine state-of-the-art audio and video processing techniques for sound activity detection, action recognition, face recognition, and pose detection to decrease the required manual labour during and after recording. These techniques used during post-processing produce meta-data allowing for footage filtering, decreasing the search space. We extended our system further by producing timelines uniting generated meta-data, allowing the editor to have a quick overview. We evaluated our system on three in-the-wild reality TV recording sessions of 24 hours (× 8 cameras) each taken in real households.