Case Study: Drivers

Project Target & Shot Conditions

The primary goal of this project was to solve a physical camera path on a road sequence with unknown settings, undistort the wide-angle camera lens distortion, reconstruct the road plane geometry, and composite a custom graphic logo directly onto the asphalt surface.

Compositing virtual assets onto flat road planes requires highly consistent perspective solves. Even a fraction of a pixel slip in the coordinate grid will instantly break the illusion of the graphic being painted onto the physical ground.

Adopted Workflow

1. Lens Undistortion: Analyzing straight lines in the plate to calculate radial lens barrel distortion coefficients.
2. Road Feature Tracking: Tracking asphalt textures, road markings, and curb corners.
3. Scene Calibration: Orienting the 3D grid alignment relative to the solved road plane.
4. Compositing Pass: Projecting the custom logo onto the road model, match-grading color profiles, and blending environmental shadows.

Solver Challenges & Solutions

Textureless Asphalt: Smooth road surfaces lack high-contrast tracker features. This was solved by applying localized contrast filters to track micro-grain features in the road surface.

Lens Barrel Distortion: Wide DSLR lenses warp linear projections. Calculating a custom radial distortion model (`K1`, `K2`) allowed the straight lines of the composite logo to stay perfectly mapped to the ground plane.