Clear Skies Ahead: Towards Real-Time Automatic Sky Replacement in Video
This provides a simple tool for nonprofessional users to enhance video aesthetics, addressing a specific domain need in video editing.
The paper tackles the problem of inconsistent or uninteresting skies in smartphone videos by proposing an algorithm for automatic sky replacement, achieving close to real-time performance on mobile devices with minimal user input.
Digital videos such as those captured by a smartphone often exhibit exposure inconsistencies, a poorly exposed sky, or simply suffer from an uninteresting or plain looking sky. Professionals may edit these videos using advanced and time-consuming tools unavailable to most users, to replace the sky with a more expressive or imaginative sky. In this work, we propose an algorithm for automatic replacement of the sky region in a video with a different sky, providing nonprofessional users with a simple yet efficient tool to seamlessly replace the sky. The method is fast, achieving close to real-time performance on mobile devices and the user's involvement can remain as limited as simply selecting the replacement sky.