Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1610.01691

Towards a Drone Cinematographer: Guiding Quadrotor Cameras using Visual Composition Principles

Niels Joubert·Jane L. E·Dan B Goldman·Floraine Berthouzoz·Mike Roberts·James A. Landay·Pat Hanrahan
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We present a system to capture video footage of human subjects in the real world. Our system leverages a quadrotor camera to automatically capture well-composed video of two subjects. Subjects are tracked in a large-scale outdoor environment using RTK GPS and IMU sensors. Then, given the tracked state of our subjects, our system automatically computes static shots based on well-established visual composition principles and canonical shots from cinematography literature. To transition between these static shots, we calculate feasible, safe, and visually pleasing transitions using a novel real-time trajectory planning algorithm. We evaluate the performance of our tracking system, and experimentally show that RTK GPS significantly outperforms conventional GPS in capturing a variety of canonical shots. Lastly, we demonstrate our system guiding a consumer quadrotor camera autonomously capturing footage of two subjects in a variety of use cases. This is the first end-to-end system that enables people to leverage the mobility of quadrotors, as well as the knowledge of expert filmmakers, to autonomously capture high-quality footage of people in the real world.

Explore related subjects

cs.GRcs.RO

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Niels Joubert, Jane L. E, Dan B Goldman, Floraine Berthouzoz, Mike Roberts, James A. Landay, Pat Hanrahan. 2016-10-05. Towards a Drone Cinematographer: Guiding Quadrotor Cameras using Visual Composition Principles. https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.01691

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

ReCHOIR: Contact-guided Human Object Interaction Retargeting to Diverse Characters

We present ReCHOIR, a novel contact-guided motion retargeting method for transferring human object interaction (HOI) motions across diverse humanoid characters. Unlike prior motion retargeting methods that primarily focus on transferring human motion alone, our goal is to preserve not only the semantics of the original body movement but also consistent interaction between the character and the manipulated object, while jointly producing aligned target human and object motions. Given source HOI motion, object geometry, and contact cues extracted from the source interaction, ReCHOIR retargets an HOI sequence to target characters with different skeletal configurations while maintaining both motion semantics and contact-consistent interaction patterns. Our method builds on a Part-Aware Motion Embedding (PAME) autoencoder, which encodes full-body motion into a shared body-part-wise latent space. This representation enables generalization across heterogeneous skeletons while preserving local motion semantics beneficial for part-aware adaptation in HOI retargeting. On top of this representation, we introduce a contact-guided retargeting module and an object motion decoder for HOI retargeting. The contact-guided retargeting module treats the source object interaction as a condition for refining target character motion: object- and contact-related signals are encoded into a body-part-aligned latent representation and injected into decoding through a residual control branch, enabling stronger adaptation in interaction-relevant body regions without discarding the underlying motion prior. In parallel, the object motion decoder predicts a target object motion aligned with the refined target character motion, ensuring that the object trajectory remains consistent with how the interaction is realized by the target character.

cs.GR↗
arXiv2026

Gaussian Light Transport

We present a novel method for computing global illumination by expressing the solution to the light transport equation as a 13D Gaussian mixture model over positions, directions, surface normals, and material properties. We show that including scene properties in the Gaussian representation drastically reduces the number of functions and speeds up evaluation. As opposed to traditional light transport methods based on Neumann series, the parameters of our model are directly estimated by minimizing the residual of the rendering equation. While both optimization and rendering require repeated evaluations of a linear combination of high-dimensional Gaussian functions, we introduce an efficient culling strategy to keep the optimization tractable and produce renderings in real time. Our representation enables to render fast, view-independent solutions to the light transport equation, achieving rendering times on the order of milliseconds, with a fraction of the memory requirements of conventional neural rendering approaches.

cs.GR↗
arXiv2026

Hologram Representation via Quadratic Phase Gaussian Splatting

We introduce Complex-Valued Quadratic Phase Gaussian (CVQPG), a novel hologram representation method that replaces standard 2D Gaussian representations used in 2D Gaussian Splatting with 2D quadratic phase functions. CVQPG incorporates additional learnable parameters to control the curvature of these bases. We evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art methods, exceeding the visual quality by +0.19 dB (RGB) and +0.33 dB (grayscale) on average in holographic reconstructions. Specifically, our equal parameter count evaluations show that modulating the primitive's wavefront is an effective and lightweight enhancement for hologram representations. In addition, our frequency domain analysis illustrates that CVQPG has successfully preserved the mid-to-high frequency band of natural images.

cs.GR↗