Turning an Urban Scene Video into a Cinemagraph

TL;DR

This paper introduces an algorithm that converts regular urban scene videos with moving cameras into seamless Cinemagraph animations by warping videos and analyzing static and dynamic regions.

Contribution

It is the first method to automatically generate Cinemagraphs from unconstrained, real-world videos with moving cameras and objects.

Findings

Successfully applied to challenging real scenes

Produces high-quality, endless animations

Automates the Cinemagraph creation process

Abstract

This paper proposes an algorithm that turns a regular video capturing urban scenes into a high-quality endless animation, known as a Cinemagraph. The creation of a Cinemagraph usually requires a static camera in a carefully configured scene. The task becomes challenging for a regular video with a moving camera and objects. Our approach first warps an input video into the viewpoint of a reference camera. Based on the warped video, we propose effective temporal analysis algorithms to detect regions with static geometry and dynamic appearance, where geometric modeling is reliable and visually attractive animations can be created. Lastly, the algorithm applies a sequence of video processing techniques to produce a Cinemagraph movie. We have tested the proposed approach on numerous challenging real scenes. To our knowledge, this work is the first to automatically generate Cinemagraph animations from regular movies in the wild.