A Probabilistic Logic Programming Approach to Automatic Video Montage

ECAI2016 had an acceptance rate of 27%Hiring a professional camera crew to cover an event such as a lecture, sports game or musical performance may be prohibitively expensive. The CAMETRON project aims at drastically reducing this cost by developing an (almost) fully automated system that can produce video recordings of such events with a quality similar to that of a professional crew. This system consists of different components, including intelligent Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras and UAVs that act as ``virtual camera men''. To combine the footage of these different cameras into a single coherent and pleasant-to-watch video, a ``virtual editor'' is needed. This paper describes the development of such a component. We adopt a declarative approach, in which we build a model of the decision process that a human editor might follow to edit a video. To achieve a montage that obeys various cinematographic rules while at the same time retaining a natural, non-mechanical feel, we construct this model in a Probabilistic Logic Programming language. We demonstrate that the resulting system can be run in real-time and that it delivers montages that are almost indistinguishable from those made by a professional editor.status: publishe