In my final project, I attempt the assigned projects of the Vertigo shot and Fake Miniatures. Both projects were extremely interesting and I learned a lot from the process. Many thanks to Professor Efros, Jun-Yun, and the readers for an excellent semester!
For this aspect of the final project, I duplicated the dolly zoom aka the "Vertigo shot" from Alfred's Hitchock's Vertigo. The algorithm is taking a picture of an object up-close, stepping back and zooming in. This way we keep the size of the object the same but we change the field of view as we step back. This creates a vertigo effect and that is seen in the movie.
Actually implementing this was hard as holding the camera steady and getting a clear picture for all four shots is difficult. This why you can see slight angle shifts from image to image. The camera I used was the high-def camera from the iPhone X which has a 12MP optical telephoto zoom lens on it. Below are my results of a DJI Spark drone and a fire extinguisher inside of 1st floor Moffit Library.
For this aspect of the final project, I created fake miniatures. What this basically means is that my code simulated the effect of Tilt Shift found in selective focus cameras. This is done via applying a mask to a building/region of interest and blurring the rest of scene. This causes the depth of field to appear wider than it is. Below is the algorithm I used to create the effect.
1. Select the points/objects that you want to focus on. This is region that is masked.
2. Increase the sigma of the blur away from the region every 30 pixels. The blur starts with sigma value of 1 and increments by 0.2. Do this in the top and down direction.
Below is the stock photo supplied with the project accompnaied with it's mask used to create the tilt effect.
Below are the rest of the other images with the tilt effect applied next to the original image.
Again many thanks to the teaching staff for this amazing semester! While these projects were tough, I felt like I learned a lot about image manipulation and photography in general. Who knew manipulating photos was so fun!