RGB-D Tracking and Reconstruction for TV Broadcasts

In this work, a real-time image-based camera tracking solution is developed for television broadcasting studio environments. An affordable vision-based system is proposed which can compete with expensive matchmoving systems. The system requires merely commodity hardware: a low cost RGB-D sensor and a standard laptop. The main contribution is avoiding time-evolving drift by tracking relative to a pre-recorded keyframe model. Camera tracking is defined as a registration problem between the current RGB-D measurement and the nearest keyframe. The keyframe poses contain only a small error and therefore the proposed method is virtually driftless. Camera tracking precision is compared to KinectFusion, which is a recent method for simultaneous camera tracking and 3D reconstruction. The proposed method is tested in a television broadcasting studio, where it demonstrates driftless and precise camera tracking in real-time.