Can We Enable the Drone to be a Filmmaker?

TL;DR

This paper introduces an autonomous drone camera system that dynamically generates smooth trajectories to capture expressive action scenes, improving visual composition and footage quality compared to existing systems.

Contribution

The paper presents the first system enabling autonomous drones to adaptively film action scenes based on human movement, integrating scene understanding and trajectory planning.

Findings

System outperforms state-of-the-art in capturing expressive footage

Demonstrates effectiveness in both simulation and real scenarios

Enhances drone cinematography with real-time scene adaptation

Abstract

Drones are enabling new forms of cinematography. However, quadrotor cinematography requires accurate comprehension of the scene, technical skill of flying, artistic skill of composition and simultaneous realization of all the requirements in real time. These requirements could pose real challenge to drone amateurs because unsuitable camera viewpoint and motion could result in unpleasing visual composition and affect the target's visibility. In this paper, we propose a novel autonomous drone camera system which captures action scenes using proper camera viewpoint and motion. The key novelty is that our system can dynamically generate smooth drone camera trajectory associated with human movement while obeying visual composition principles. We evaluate the performance of our cinematography system on simulation and real scenario. The experimental results demonstrate that our system can capture more expressive video footage of human action than that of the state-of-the-art drone camera system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first cinematography system that enables people to leverage the mobility of quadrotor to autonomously capture high-quality footage of action scene based on subject's movements.