Egocentric Basketball Motion Planning from a Single First-Person Image

We present a model that uses a single first-person image to generate an egocentric basketball motion sequence in the form of a 12D camera configuration trajectory, which encodes a player’s 3D location and 3D head orientation throughout the sequence. To do this, we first introduce a future convolutional neural network (CNN) that predicts an initial sequence of 12D camera configurations, aiming to capture how real players move during a one-on-one basketball game. We also introduce a goal verifier network, which is trained to verify that a given camera configuration is consistent with the final goals of real one-on-one basketball players. Next, we propose an inverse synthesis procedure to synthesize a refined sequence of 12D camera configurations that (1) sufficiently matches the initial configurations predicted by the future CNN, while (2) maximizing the output of the goal verifier network. Finally, by following the trajectory resulting from the refined camera configuration sequence, we obtain the complete 12D motion sequence. Our model generates realistic basketball motion sequences that capture the goals of real players, outperforming standard deep learning approaches such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), and generative adversarial networks (GANs).