Posts Tagged image recognition
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos
Posted by Shareef in CG, documentary, photography, technology on March 15th, 2009
Researchers at GRAIL, the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory of the University of Washington, are finding great ways to enhance the video quality of a static scene using still photographs.
The work presents a system for automatically producing a wide variety of video enhancements and visual effects. Unlike traditional visual effects software (e.g., After Effects, Shake, Boujou, etc), the system is completely automatic and no manual labor is required from the user. The major limitation of the work is that it can currently handle only videos of static scenes (i.e., videos shot with a moving camera but containing no moving objects in the scene). Efforts are being made to lift this restriction in future work.
Interactive Video Object Manipulation
Posted by Shareef in CG, documentary, technology on March 15th, 2009
A joint research project between Adobe and the University of Washington have produced fascinating tools to manipulate video. Most interesting of all is the drag tool, shown at 02:34, where the user is able to pull a person’s head in different directions while the video plays. To achieve this an image analysis is performed and different points in the video are tracked, after which the objects are then distinguishable away from the rest of the scene. The person’s head is turned to the side at a different point in the timeline, only the drag tool takes these frame segments and copies it to the current segment of time line. The tool can only manipulate the objects in the video in ways that occur at any point in the time line. You could not, for example, make the character poke his tongue out, as this doesn’t happen at any point during the video. Nevertheless, these are great breakthroughs in video manipulation.
Augmented Reality with your webcam!
Posted by Shareef in CG, documentary, technology on March 5th, 2009
The General Electric Company (GE) have devised an amazing way to experience Augmented Reality in your own home. Using a print-out of a PDf that they provide, a digital hologram of their new Smart Grid concept will open up from the page on your computer screen. If you then blow into a microphone the wind turbines spin faster. Try it for yourself.
The hologram uses a Flash ActionScript 3.0 toolkit called FLARToolKit which is a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications. It seems they have created a program that will make any webcam initiate the hologram if the shapes on the paper are detected. It then continues to track their position in 3D space, along with their X and Y-axis rotation to then have the hologram follow appropriately. Does the Doctor in Start Trek Voyager come to mind, anyone?
Follow Me On...
