Interactive weathering of depth-inferred videos

• Authors: Lin Xia;Zilong Dong;Guofeng Zhang;Duanjin Chen;Hujun Bao
• Venue: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Virtual Reality Continuum and Its Applications in Industry
• Year: 2011

Aging or weathering is an important technique for generating natural images in computer graphics. In this paper, we propose a novel video weathering method which can synthesize the weathering effects for the real captured videos. We first recover the depth maps of the input video, and employ a depth-based interactive video object cutout method to efficiently extract the target objects. Then, we sample the 3D point cloud from the recovered depth maps within the specified object mask, and reconstruct the 3D geometry model. In order to make the obtained 3D point cloud accurate with small redundancy, we select the pixels with the priority of depth accuracy and project each sample to other frames to avoid reselection. In the weathering stage, with the reconstructed 3D mesh, we employ γ-ton tracing to create the weathering map, and then compute the correspondence point for each object pixel on the weathering map by intersecting with the 3D mesh, which is used to resemble the weathering value to blend the texture with the original pixel color. We also introduce two interactive tools which allow the user to guide the process of weathering. A number of weathering effects are shown in the experimental results to demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method.