CS 194: Computational Photography, Fall 2017

CS 194 Final Project 1: Video Textures

Anshul Tibrewal, CS194-aam



Part 1: The Algorihm

Video textures is a technique first described in a paper by A Schodl which allows you to make continuous infinitely varying stream of images from a small clip. The algorithm I used computes the costs of transformations for the upcoming images on the video stream as delineated by this slide from my lecture:

Transitioon Costs
I compute these costs for all the images from the video stream and find a list of transitions which are far enough away from the current frame. I select 6 such "jump" transitions and then write a loop which writes 1000 frames of video content by randomly jumping betweenframes at the 6 transition jump fram indices.

Part 2: The Results

I ran my algorithm on one video of a soldiers march performance and on a harlem shake video. I could not put the sound back in but the results are impressive:



Soldiers marching Orignal
Harlem Shake Orignal
Soldiers marching video texture
Harlem Shake video texture

Part 3: Reflections

What I learned

I really enjoyed doing this project for it was the first time I got to process video data and while it took very long to run I am glad I could gain this experience. I learnt a lot about finding transitions such that they are sufficiently far away and yet not too different.

What I could improve upon

I did not implement video textures with preserved dynamics. Maybe I can look into this but just my algorithm will be even slower. Also I could not implement sound back into the video textures because that was difficult to process but finding a way to do it in a nice way.

CS 194 Final Project 2: Dolly Zoom



Procedure

Dolly zoom is a visual effect technique first pioneered in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. It is generated by changing the field of view (zoom) of your camera while moving away from the subject. I took 5 photographs of Haas Pavilion and 4 photographs of my friend Kim to generates some zoom gifs.

Results

Here are the gifs I generated:

Haas Pavilion
Kimbo

Reflections

What I learned

This was a fun short project and gave my friends a good laugh.

What I could do more

I wanted to take photos of stairs like in the movie vertigo but I didnt find a suitably high staircase to do it.