  Capturing an event from multiple camera angles can give a viewer the most
complete and interesting picture of that event. To be suitable for
broadcasting, a human director needs to decide what to show at each point in
time. This can become cumbersome with an increasing number of camera angles.
The introduction of omnidirectional or wide-angle cameras has allowed for
events to be captured more completely, making it even more difficult for the
director to pick a good shot. In this paper, a system is presented that, given
multiple ultra-high resolution video streams of an event, can generate a
visually pleasing sequence of shots that manages to follow the relevant action
of an event. Due to the algorithm being general purpose, it can be applied to
most scenarios that feature humans. The proposed method allows for online
processing when real-time broadcasting is required, as well as offline
processing when the quality of the camera operation is the priority. Object
detection is used to detect humans and other objects of interest in the input
streams. Detected persons of interest, along with a set of rules based on
cinematic conventions, are used to determine which video stream to show and
what part of that stream is virtually framed. The user can provide a number of
settings that determine how these rules are interpreted. The system is able to
handle input from different wide-angle video streams by removing lens
distortions. Using a user study it is shown, for a number of different
scenarios, that the proposed automated director is able to capture an event
with aesthetically pleasing video compositions and human-like shot switching
behavior.
