Illustration:
Christine Daniloff/MIT
(November 4, 2015) Exploiting video game software yields
broadcast-quality 3-D video of soccer games in real time.
By exploiting the graphics-rendering software that powers
sports video games, researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research
Institute (QCRI) have developed a system that automatically converts 2-D video
of soccer games into 3-D.
The converted video can be played back over any 3-D device —
a commercial 3-D TV, Google’s new Cardboard system, which turns smartphones
into 3-D displays, or special-purpose displays such as Oculus Rift.
The researchers presented the new system last week at the
Association for Computing Machinery’s Multimedia conference.
“Any TV these days is capable of 3-D,” says Wojciech
Matusik, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science
at MIT and one of the system’s co-developers. “There’s just no content. So we see
that the production of high-quality content is the main thing that should
happen. But sports is very hard. With movies, you have artists who paint the
depth map. Here, there is no luxury of hiring 100 artists to do the conversion.
This has to happen in real-time.”
The system is one result of a collaboration between QCRI and
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Joining Matusik
on the conference paper are Kiana Calagari, a research associate at QCRI and
first author; Alexandre Kaspar, an MIT graduate student in electrical
engineering and computer science; Piotr Didyk, who was a postdoc in Matusik’s
group and is now a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics;
Mohamed Hefeeda, a principal scientist at QCRI; and Mohamed Elgharib, a QCRI
postdoc. QCRI also helped fund the project.
Zeroing in
In the past, researchers have tried to develop
general-purpose systems for converting 2-D video to 3-D, but they haven’t
worked very well and have tended to produce odd visual artifacts that detract
from the viewing experience.