Sports VR content generation from regular camera feeds

With the recent availability of commodity Virtual Reality (VR) products, immersive video content is receiving a significant interest. However, producing high-quality VR content often requires upgrading the entire production pipeline, which is costly and time-consuming. In this work, we propose using video feeds from regular broadcasting cameras to generate immersive content. We utilize the motion of the main camera to generate a wide-angle panorama. Using various techniques, we remove the parallax and align all video feeds. We then overlay parts from each video feed on the main panorama using Poisson blending. We examined our technique on various sports including basketball, ice hockey and volleyball. Subjective studies show that most participants rated their immersive experience when viewing our generated content between Good to Excellent. In addition, most participants rated their sense of presence to be similar to ground-truth content captured using a GoPro Omni 360 camera rig.