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

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 wellestablished 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. ∗Niels Joubert and Jane E contributed equally to this work.