Improved Algorithm for Seamlessly Creating Infinite Loops from a Video Clip, while Preserving Variety in Textures
This work addresses the need for generating high-quality, non-repetitive GIFs or moving pictures from videos with textures like waving flags or rain, but it is incremental as it builds upon an existing method with specific enhancements.
The paper tackles the problem of creating seamless infinite loops from video clips with repeated motion by implementing and extending the 'Video Textures' algorithm, resulting in improvements through a wavelet-based distance metric, intensity normalization, cross-fading, and morphing, while experimenting with trade-offs between variety and smoothness.
This project implements the paper "Video Textures" by Szeliski. The aim is to create a "Moving Picture" or as we popularly call it, a GIF; which is "somewhere between a photograph and a video". The idea is to input a video which has some repeated motion (the texture), such as a flag waving, rain, or a candle flame. The output is a new video that infinitely extends the original video in a seamless way. In practice, the output isn't really infinte, but is instead looped using a video player and is sufficiently long as to appear to never repeat. Our goal from this implementation was to: improve distance metric by switching from a crude sum of squared distance to most sophisticated wavelet-based distance; add intensity normalization, cross-fading and morphing to the suggested basic algorithm. We also experiment on the trade-off between variety and smoothness.