Turning an Urban Scene Video Into a Cinemagraph

Hang Yan, Yebin Liu, Yasutaka Furukawa; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 394-402

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.