Image-Based Modeling and Rendering.
A central problem in computer graphics is producing images that
appear photographic, thereby fooling people into believing they are
viewing a real scene. While rendering techniques have advanced dramatically
in recent years, we are still far from this goal of photorealism, largely
because of the difficulty of constructing realistic 3D models.
We propose to solve this problem by "importing" real-world objects and scenes
from photographs and paintings.
Towards this end, we are developing two classes of techniques, based on
image morphing and 3D reconstruction, respectively. The first approach
rearranges pixels in a set of input images in order to produce images of the
scene from different camera viewpoints. This view morphing approach
enables effects such as rotating a person's head in 3D from one photograph.
We are also investigating voxel-based 3D reconstruction techniques to solve
larger-scale visualization problems, such as producing building walkthroughs
and flybys of complex landscapes by processing images from video camcorders.
3D Augmented Video Editing.
Imagine trying to remove a moving figure from one video sequence and
paste it into another. While simple to describe, this operation is
extremely difficult to achieve because of the need to manually trace
moving contours in every frame of an image sequence.
The goal of this project is to develop video
editing tools that blend user-interaction with computer vision techniques
in order to manipulate entire video sequences by touching only a small number
of frames. In addition to cut-and-paste operations, we are interested
in 2D Photoshop-style editing operations that propagate
(e.g., applying lipstick to a moving face by painting it into a single frame)
as well as 3D effects like changing camera viewpoint and illumination
conditions.