Motion based remote camera control with mobile devices

Abstract

With current digital cameras and smartphones, taking photos and videos has never been easier. However, it is still difficult to take a photo of a brief action at the right time. In addition, editing captured videos, such as modifying the playback speed of some parts of a video, remains a time consuming task. In this work we investigate how the motion sensors embedded in mobile devices, such as smartphones, can facilitate camera control. In particular, we show two families of applications: automatic camera trigger control for jump photos and automatic playback speed control (video speed ramping) for action videos. Our approach uses joint devices: a remote camera takes a photo or a video of the scene and it is controlled by the motion sensor of a mobile device, either during or after recording. This allows casual users to achieve visually appealing effects with little effort, even for self portraits.