Automated Cinematography with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel UAV navigation system for autonomous cinematography that adapts virtual camera control techniques and offers a drone-independent platform for real-time, cinematographically guided drone filming.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach combining virtual camera control with drone navigation and a high-level platform integrating cinematographic knowledge.

Findings

Successfully captures live scenes with moving actors

Demonstrates real-time autonomous drone cinematography

Validates effectiveness of the platform in film scenarios

Abstract

The rise of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and their increasing use in the cinema industry calls for the creation of dedicated tools. Though there is a range of techniques to automatically control drones for a variety of applications, none have considered the problem of producing cinematographic camera motion in real-time for shooting purposes. In this paper we present our approach to UAV navigation for autonomous cinematography. The contributions of this research are twofold: (i) we adapt virtual camera control techniques to UAV navigation; (ii) we introduce a drone-independent platform for high-level user interactions that integrates cinematographic knowledge. The results presented in this paper demonstrate the capacities of our tool to capture live movie scenes involving one or two moving actors.