Viewpoint-Dependent Quality Control on Microfacet Billboarding Model for Sports Video

We propose a new on-line modeling and rendering method for visualizing players in sports. This method targets the intricate geometry of players in sports such as wrestling. Our system can maintain modeling and rendering quality on producing free-viewpoint 3D video of the players by utilizing the virtual viewpoint information of the viewer. Viewers can move a virtual camera freely over the scene while the system manages the processing cost by changing the size of the voxels and microfacets used for spatial modeling of the players. The system first estimates the rough 3D shape of the players in voxel format, and then assigns a microfacet to each voxel. The texture of the microfacet is obtained from the video cameras surrounding the players. Our preliminary system was evaluated on the wrestling data taken in the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, Tokyo, Japan. We also conducted subjective evaluation of the free-viewpoint video thus produced and found a good balance of rendering quality and high frame-rate performance.