Improved Algorithm for Seamlessly Creating Infinite Loops from a Video Clip, while Preserving Variety in Textures

TL;DR

This paper enhances video texture synthesis by improving distance metrics and adding techniques like normalization and morphing to create seamless, visually varied infinite loops from video clips.

Contribution

It introduces a wavelet-based distance metric and additional processing techniques to improve the quality and variety of seamless video loops.

Findings

Wavelet-based distance improves loop quality

Normalization and morphing enhance visual variety

Trade-off analysis between variety and smoothness

Abstract

This project implements the paper "Video Textures" by Szeliski. The aim is to create a "Moving Picture" or as we popularly call it, a GIF; which is "somewhere between a photograph and a video". The idea is to input a video which has some repeated motion (the texture), such as a flag waving, rain, or a candle flame. The output is a new video that infinitely extends the original video in a seamless way. In practice, the output isn't really infinte, but is instead looped using a video player and is sufficiently long as to appear to never repeat. Our goal from this implementation was to: improve distance metric by switching from a crude sum of squared distance to most sophisticated wavelet-based distance; add intensity normalization, cross-fading and morphing to the suggested basic algorithm. We also experiment on the trade-off between variety and smoothness.