Ambiance Sharing

1. Project in nutshell

Project Ambiance sharing is all about recording and/or sharing of an 360 degree audio-visual scene through some kind of multi-camera & multi-microphone array system configuration. The project topic itself is very broad and there are many challenges in the array setup and processing. The project has two big challenges: To have a multi-camera processing system to cover 360 degree 3D visual scene and multi-microphone processing system to record or process 3D sound synchronized along with the 3D visual scene.

Due to project time limitation we set the goals for multi-camera array system. Instead of recording 360 degree scene, we first decided to work with processing of multi-camera system with only 2 cameras and see how good can we record 3D scene from 2 2D cameras. We finally managed to setup a system to record a 3D scene from two 2D cameras.

2. What did we learn?

The calibration of the cameras is a tough job to do. We learnt OpenCV library for image and video processing and learnt how the library could be used for calibration purposes. Moreover, we learnt how to make an interface for the cameras using Qt and learnt to make an SDK for the application.

3. Feelings about whole process?

The whole process was really informative and we came to know different aspects of the technology for developing nice and cool applications from the customers point of view. May be in future, the technology would become mature enough to provide different applications for the customers.

4. What was best thing?

Managing to record a visual scene after cameras calibration was a joyful moment and when we saw a 3D effect on a mobile device, we were really feeling proud that we can work for real industrial projects utilizing our technical skills.

5. Customers comments

Well they were really satisfied with the results and they even offer us to work further on the project, but unfortunately the team members were busy with the courses at school, so we had to leave the project work after initial task completions and evaluations.

6. Project members

Asif Sardar,  Tampere University of Technology, Information Technology.
Ali Karaoglu, Tampere University of Technology, Information Technology.
Lauri Soini,  Tampere University of Technology, Information Technology.
Hong Liu,     Tampere University of Technology, Information Technology.