Abstract
Drone-mounted flying cameras will revolutionize
photo-taking. The user, instead of holding a camera
in hand and manually searching for a viewpoint, will
interact directly with image contents in the viewfinder
through simple gestures, and the flying camera will
achieve the desired viewpoint through the autonomous
flying capability of the drone. This work studies a common
situation in photo-taking, i.e., the underlying viewpoint
search problem for composing a photo with two objects
of interest. We model it as a Perspective-2-Point (P2P)
problem, which is under-constrained to determine the six
degrees-of-freedom camera pose uniquely. By incorporating the user’s composition requirements and minimizing
the camera’s flying distance, we form a constrained nonlinear optimization problem and solve it in closed form.
Experiments on synthetic data sets and on a flying camera
system indicate promising results