SceneNet - Mobile Crowd Sourcing Video Scene Reconstruction

Logo SceneNet

Researcher: Peter Maaß, Amir Egozi
Project funding: Europäische Union, Future Emerging Technologies FET-Open
Project sponsor: European Commission (EC)
Partner: Pierre Vandergheynst, EPFL, Schweiz; SagivTech Ltd., Israel; Steinbeis Innovationszentrum SCiLS, Steinbeis Innovation gGmbH; Oliver Panzer, European Research Services GmbH
Duration: 01.02.2013 - 31.01.2016

For some years now, concerts, sporting events or family celebrations can hardly do without filming the scenes with smartphones. These videos only show a small angle of the scenario and are often of low quality. The SceneNet project aimed to transfer audio-visual recordings of a public event into a video sequence of the highest quality. In this video, an event can then be viewed interactively from a wide variety of angles.

The main tasks of our working group included the development of new pre-processing methods for the data on the servers used, including spatial calibration and registration as well as synchronisation (temporal, audio).

Prominent members were recruited for the SceneNet project's advisory board, who actively support the project: Israeli singer-songwriter and guitarist Izhar Ashdot, Malte Blumenthal (Vice President E-Commerce of CTS-Eventim AG), Prof. Dr. Hans-Georg Stark (Aschaffenburg University of Applied Sciences) and Prof. Dr. Franziska Böhm (University of Münster).

After the great success of the Audio Visual Gestalt workshop in September 2014 in Bremen, the second AVG workshop was organised in October 2015 as part of the SceneNet project, this time in Lisbon, Portugal. Both workshops addressed the question of how numerous audio-visual sources can be used to get an enhanced experience of a particular scene that can be shared with others. In Lisbon, many aspects were discussed on this topic, such as data collection and synchronisation, 3D/4D data reconstruction and visualisation aspects. Keynote speakers were Prof. Pedro Assunçao (Politechnical Institute Leiria, Portugal), Dr. Nuno Correia (New University of Lisbon, Portugal) and Prof. Hans-Georg Stark (Aschaffenburg University of Applied Sciences). In addition to the SceneNet consortium, the representatives of six other EU-funded projects took part. These included c-Space, HANDiCAMS, Harvest4D, PHENICX, FOKUS K3D and ICoSOLE. As these were also represented at the first workshop in Bremen, the participants of the Lisbon workshop were at the same time given a good insight into the interim progress and developments of these EU projects.

At the end of the project, SceneNet was rated "excellent" by both the evaluators and the European Commission. At the final meeting, which took place in Bremen in March 2016, an impressive live demo and a conceptual website were presented.