Representational Requirements for a Plan Based Approach to Automated Camera Control

Automated camera control has been an active area of research for a number of years. The problem has been addressed in the Graphics, AI and Game communities from different perspectives. The main focus of the research in the Graphics community has been frame composition and coherence. The AI community has focused on intelligent shot selection, and the Games community strives for realtime cinematic camera control. While the proposed solutions in each of these fields are promising, there has not been much effort spent on listing out the requirements of an intelligent camera control system and how these can be satisfied through a combination of approaches taken from these different fields. This paper attempts to list out the representational requirements with a view of finding a unifying representation for combining these disparate approaches. We show how a plan based approach can capture some of these requirements and it can be connected to a geometric constraint solver for camera placement.