Viewpoint Selection for Human Actions

In many scenarios a dynamic scene is filmed by multiple video cameras located at different viewing positions. Visualizing such multi-view data on a single display raises an immediate question—which cameras capture better views of the scene? Typically, (e.g. in TV broadcasts) a human producer manually selects the best view. In this paper we wish to automate this process by evaluating the quality of a view, captured by every single camera. We regard human actions as three-dimensional shapes induced by their silhouettes in the space-time volume. The quality of a view is then evaluated based on features of the space-time shape, which correspond with limb visibility. Resting on these features, two view quality approaches are proposed. One is generic while the other can be trained to fit any preferred action recognition method. Our experiments show that the proposed view selection provide intuitive results which match common conventions. We further show that it improves action recognition results.