Producing stylized videos using the AnimVideo rendering tool

Abstract

AbstractStylized rendering is the process of generating images or videos that can have the visual appeal of pieces of art, expressing the visual and emotional characteristics of artistic styles. A major problem in stylizing videos is the absence of temporal coherence, something that results in flickering of the structural drawing elements (such as brush strokes or curves), also known as swimming. This article describes the AnimVideo rendering tool that was developed for stylizing videos with temporal coherence. The temporal coherence is achieved by first fully segmenting the input video with a fast fuzzy segmentation algorithm that uses hybrid color spaces and motion information. The result of the segmentation algorithm is used to constrain the result of an optical flow algorithm, given as dense optical flow maps that are then used to correctly move, remove, or add structural drawing elements. The combination of these two methods is referred to as constrained optical flow, and we also provide the option of initializing the optical flow computation with displacement maps computed by homographies that map objects in adjacent frames. Also, we briefly describe some stylized rendering methods that were implemented in the tool. Finally, experimental results are shown, including snapshots of the tool's interface and illustrative examples of the produced renderings that validates the proposed techniques. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 19, 100–110, 2009.