Cinematographic Rules Applied to a Camera Network

We present a camera network system consisting of several modules of 2-3 low end cameras attached to one computer. It is not possible for a human to observe all the information coming from such a network simultaneously. Our system is designed to select the best viewpoint for each part of the video sequence, thus automatically creating one real-time video stream that contains the most important data. It acts as a combination of a director and a cameraman. Cinematography developed its own terminology, techniques and rules, how to make a good movie. We illustrate here some of these techniques and how they can be applied to a camera network, to solve the best viewpoint selection problem. Our system consists of only fixed cameras, but the output is not constrained to already existing views. A virtual zoom can be applied to select only a part of the view. We propose a view interpolation algorithm which makes it possible to create new intermediate views from the existing camera images. The combination of all these techniques gathers information from a complete camera network and produces one attractive real-time video stream. The resulting video can typically be used for telepresence applications or as a documentary or instruction video.