Advanced Composition in Virtual Camera Control

Abstract

Abstract. Rapid increase in the quality of 3D content coupled with the evolution of hardware rendering techniques urges the development of camera control systems that enable the application of aesthetic rules and conventions from visual media such as film and television. One of the most important problems in cinematography is that of composition, the precise placement of elements in shot. Researchers already considered this problem, but mainly focused on basic compositional properties like size and framing. In this paper, we present a camera system that automatically configures the camera in order to satisfy advanced compositional rules. We have selected a number of those rules and specified rating functions for them, then using optimisation we find the best possible camera configuration. Finally, for better results, we use image processing methods to rate the satisfaction of rules in shot.

Virtual cinematography using optimization and temporal smoothing

“…Issues such as the sensitive nature of the shot weighting and difficulty with over-constraining led to the development of boolean constraint systems such as ConstraintCam (Bares et al, 2000), as well as stochastic optimization techniques allowing interactive-time solutions that can be interpolated to approximate a real-time solution (Burelli et al, 2008;Abdullah et al, 2011). Some researchers have even gone so far as to attempt to use systems such as these to control in game cameras with varied success (Burelli, 2012).…”

“…This requires that complex elements in the scene be represented by multiple points. This point-based model varies from the explicit geometric models (Bares et al, 2000;Jardillier and Langunou, 1998), where each camera pose is evaluated based on observations of geometric primitives approximating complex objects, as well as from rendering-based methods (Burelli et al, 2008;Abdullah et al, 2011), where each camera pose is evaluated by analyzing a full rendering of the scene from that pose.…”

Aesthetic Image Enhancement by Dependence-Aware Object Recomposition

“…In-camera systems that automatically adjust the camera settings to satisfy compositional rules have been developed [1], and some aesthetic features such as depth-of-field can be automatically controlled by the in-camera system [4]. However, these in-camera systems cannot improve the photo composition after shooting.…”

“…We normalize the positions of the objects in [0, 1] 2 . The centroid of the most salient region of object i is used as the object center c i .…”

Virtual photography using multi-objective particle swarm optimization

“…Virtual photography has been applied to cinematography to assist in composition. Abdullah et al [1] use a PSO to optimize cinematographic images via composition rules. Burelli and Preuss use multi-objective optimization for automatic cinematography [9].…”