Page 1 of 1

Parallax Phtghpy: Creating 3D Cinematic Effcts from Stills

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 5:54 pm
by Paramvir Singh
We present an approach to convert a small portion of a light field with extracted depth information into a cinematic effect with sim- ulated, smooth camera motion that exhibits a sense of 3D parallax. We develop a taxonomy of the cinematic conventions of these ef- fects, distilled from observations of documentary film footage and organized by the number of subjects of interest in the scene. We present an automatic, content-aware approach to apply these cin- ematic conventions to an input light field. A face detector identi- fies subjects of interest. We then optimize for a camera path that conforms to a cinematic convention, maximizes apparent parallax, and avoids missing information in the input. We describe a GPU- accelerated, temporally coherent rendering algorithm that allows users to create more complex camera moves interactively, while experimenting with effects such as focal length, depth of field, and selective, depth-based desaturation or brightening. We evaluate and demonstrate our approach on a wide variety of scenes and present a user study that compares our 3D cinematic effects to their 2D counterparts.