A tutorial about “Drone Vision for Cinematography and Media Production” will take place during ICIP 2018. Presenters are: Ioannis Pitas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), J. R. Martínez-de Dios (University of Seville, Spain), Anastasios Tefas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece).

Summary

The aim of drone cinematography is to develop innovative intelligent single- and multiple-drone platforms for media production. Such systems should be able to cover outdoor events (e.g., sports) that are typically distributed over large expanses, ranging, for example, from a stadium to an entire city. The drone or drone team, to be managed by the production director and his/her production crew, shall have: a) increased multiple drone decisional autonomy, hence allowing event coverage in the time span of around one hour in an outdoor environment and b) improved multiple drone robustness and safety mechanisms (e.g., communication robustness/safety, embedded flight regulation compliance, enhanced crowd avoidance and emergency landing mechanisms), enabling it to carry out its mission against errors or crew inaction and to handle emergencies. Such robustness is particularly important, as the drones will operate close to crowds and/or may face environmental hazards (e.g., wind). Therefore, it must be contextually aware and adaptive, towards maximizing shooting creativity and productivity, while minimizing production costs. Drone vision and machine learning play an important role towards this end, covering the following topics: a) drone localization, b) drone visual analysis for target/obstacle/crowd/point of interest detection, c) 2D/3D target tracking, d) privacy protection technologies in drones (e.g. face de-identification).

The tutorial will offer an overview of all the above plus other related topics such as: a) current state of the art on the use of drones in cinematography, advertisement, news coverage, sports and media production in general, b) multiple drone mission planning and flight control, c) communication issues in drones (e.g. video streaming), d) security and ethics issues in drones.

Read more here

Tutorial at ICIP2018