Aesthetics Driven Autonomous Time-Lapse Photography Generation by Virtual and Real Robots

TL;DR

This paper presents an innovative system combining virtual and real robots to automate and optimize time-lapse photography with aesthetic quality assessment, making professional-like videos more efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a parameter optimization method and aesthetic assessment for time-lapse photography, integrating virtual and real robots for efficient video generation.

Findings

System produces time-lapse videos comparable to professional photographers.

The approach significantly reduces shooting time and effort.

User study confirms system's effectiveness and efficiency.

Abstract

Time-lapse photography is employed in movies and promotional films because it can reflect the passage of time in a short time and strengthen the visual attraction. However, since it takes a long time and requires the stable shooting, it is a great challenge for the photographer. In this article, we propose a time-lapse photography system with virtual and real robots. To help users shoot time-lapse videos efficiently, we first parameterize the time-lapse photography and propose a parameter optimization method. For different parameters, different aesthetic models, including image and video aesthetic quality assessment networks, are used to generate optimal parameters. Then we propose a time-lapse photography interface to facilitate users to view and adjust parameters and use virtual robots to conduct virtual photography in a three-dimensional scene. The system can also export the parameters and provide them to real robots so that the time-lapse videos can be filmed in the real world. In addition, we propose a time-lapse photography aesthetic assessment method that can automatically evaluate the aesthetic quality of time-lapse video. The experimental results show that our method can efficiently obtain the time-lapse videos. We also conduct a user study. The results show that our system has the similar effect as professional photographers and is more efficient.