2D to 3D Conversion of Sports Content Using Panoramas

We present a system to automatically create high-quality stereoscopic video from monoscopic footage of field-based sports by exploiting context-specific priors, such as the ground plane, player size, and known background.

Given video from a single camera, conversion to two-view stereoscopic 3D is a challenging problem. We present a system to automatically create high-quality stereoscopic video from monoscopic footage of field-based sports by exploiting context-specific priors, such as the ground plane, player size, and known background. Our main contribution is a novel technique that constructs per-shot panoramas to ensure temporally consistent stereoscopic depth in video reconstructions. Players are rendered as billboards at correct depths on the ground plane. Our method uses additional sports priors to disambiguate segmentation artifacts and produce synthesized 3D shots that are in most cases, indistinguishable from stereoscopic ground truth footage.