Graphics & Imaging

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene

Pravin Bhat, University of Washington
C. Lawrence Zitnick, Microsoft Research
Noah Snavely, University of Washington
Aseem Agarwala, Adobe Systems
Maneesh Agrawala, University of California, Berkeley
Brian Curless, University of Washington
Michael Cohen, Microsoft Research
Sing Bing Kang, Microsoft Research

We developed a framework for automatically enhancing videos of a static scene using a few photographs of the same scene. For example, our system can transfer photographic qualities such as high resolution, high dynamic range and better lighting from the photographs to the video. Additionally, the user can quickly modify the video by editing only a few still images of the scene. Finally, our system allows a user to remove unwanted objects and camera shake from the video. These capabilities are enabled by two technical contributions presented in this paper. First, we make several improvements to a state-of-the-art multiview stereo algorithm in order to compute view-dependent depths using video, photographs, and structure-from-motion data. Second, we present a novel image-based rendering algorithm that can re-render the input video using the appearance of the photographs while preserving certain temporal dynamics such as specularities and dynamic scene lighting.

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Some of the video enhancements produced by our system. Given a low quality video of a static scene (top row) and a few high quality photographs of the scene, our system can automatically produce a variety of video enhancements (bottom row). Enhancements include the transfer of photographic qualities such as high resolution, high dynamic range, and better exposure from photographs to video. The video can also be edited in a variety of ways (e.g., object touchup, object removal) by simply editing a few photographs or video frames.

Demo movie link

University of Washington Project Website

Publications

• Bhat, P., Zitnick, C. L., Snavely, N., Agarwala, A., Agrawala, M., Curless, B., Cohen, M., and Kang, S. B. 2007. Using photographs to enhance videos of a static scene. In Rendering Techniques 2007 (Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering), 327–338.