Generating VR Live Videos with Tripod Panoramic Rig

Recent breakthrough in consumer-level virtual reality (VR) devices brings an increasing demand of VR live content. As converting real life content into VR need complex computations, current techniques can not synthesize 360° 3D VR content with high performance, not to mention real time. We propose an end-to-end system that records a scene using a tripod panoramic rig and broadcasts 360° stereo panorama videos in real time. The system performs a panorama stitching technique which pre-compute 3 stitching seam candidates for dynamic seam switching in the live broadcasting. This technique achieves high frame rates (>30fps) with minimum foreground cutoff and temporal jittering artifacts. Stereo vision quality is also better preserved by a proposed weighting-based image alignment scheme. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a variety of videos delivering live events. And our system has been successfully used in broadcasting live shows to mobile phone users on a professional live broadcasting platform with about 390 million user visits per month.