Free-Viewpoint Video of Outdoor Sports Using a Drone

We propose a novel drone application under real-world scenarios – free-viewpoint rendering of outdoor sports scenes, including the dynamic athlete and the 360° background. Outdoor sports have long-range human motions and large-scale scene structures which make the task rather challenging. Existing methods either rely on dense camera arrays which costs much, or a handheld moving camera which struggles to handle real sports scenes. We build a novel drone-based system using an RGB camera to reconstruct the 4D dynamic human along with the 3D unbounded scene, rendering free-viewpoint videos at any time. We also propose submodules for calibration and human motion capture, as a system-level design for improved robustness and efficiency. We collect a dataset AerialRecon and conduct extensive experiments on real-world scenarios. Compared with existing SOTA systems, our system demonstrates superior performance and applicability to real-world outdoor sports scenes.