See-through view generation from multi-camera baseball movies

We present a method of generating new view-point movies for baseball games. The most interesting view-point in a baseball game is looking from behind the catcher. However, because the view is interrupted by the umpire and catcher, setting up a camera behind the catcher is impossible, and setting up a camera on the catchers head is also impossible. Therefore, we removed the obstacles (catcher and umpire) from the movie captured from behind the catcher, and generated a see-through movie by using multiple cameras to recover the pitcher's appearance. Our method consists of two processes; recovering the pitcher's appearance by homography, and detecting obstacles by using Graph Cut. To clarify how effective our method is, we generated a see-through movie by applying our method to multiple-camera movies taken in a baseball stadium. In the see-through-movie, the pitcher appears through the catcher and umpire.