Odysseus

One of the most talked about movie special effect of the last few years has been the "stop-action motion effect" introduced in movies such as "The Matrix" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". It involves apparently freezing a 3D action sequence and "moving the camera around while all the actors are frozen, before resuming the action from another camera position. The technique used to create such an effect involves capturing a scene using multiple cameras that surround the action taking place and then synthesizing new views of the scene while moving between the original viewpoints. This process is known as view interpolation. Interestingly, it does not necessarily require the expensive 360 degrees camera set-up on a sound stage usually associated with such filming. If there is a relatively small amount of action to be filmed (or indeed none at all if a static object is the centre of attention) this process can be effectively performed using a smaller number of cameras in a less constrained environment. As such, a large number of applications are emerging that allow users to freely navigate within captured events (e.g. concerts or sports competitions) or around objects (e.g. static machinery in a factory). Indeed, recent growth in this area has led the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of ISO/IEC to investigate the requirement for standardization among the various emerging approaches. As early developers of the underlying technology, we are key contributors to this initiative.

Recently, we have been successful in a bid for a new Enterprise Ireland Proof of Concept project that aims to show the usefulness of this technology in an altogether different application field. The DigiFact project aims to develop a low-cost solution for digitisation and indexing of multiple views of museum artifacts. It has the support of both the National Museum of Ireland, and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (in Cambridge, Mass, U.S.A.) who are developing complementary technology. The system to be developed will be a low-cost (albeit lower quality) alternative to full 3D laser scanning of artifacts - an expensive and difficult process that can only be undertaken for the most famous/valuable of museum artifacts and not for the thousands of other artifacts in such collections. This has the potential to substantially aid the cataloguing process for artifacts that currently receive only very rudimentary free text and still image indexing.

An initial version of the DigiFact capture station has already been built that features a motorised turntable for capturing multiple views of objects (e.g. chalices) in front of a "green screen" that facilitates object extraction via chroma-keying. This internship will target the development of an enduser indexing and retrieval application for this system featuring suitable indexing mechanisms for user-definable synthetic views of artifacts based on both 2D and 3D information. This will involve working closely with the full-time researchers currently developing the indexing and view synthesis algorithms so that the outputs can be leveraged effectively.

Relevance of Project to the Host Laboratories:

In the last two years, the Centre for Digital Video Processing has extended its research programme to address 3D video processing, including compression, analysis and view synthesis. The new research theme includes funded by Science Foundation Ireland as part of the Adaptive Information Cluster as well as the DigiFact project. In addition, a number of projects in this space are run as both undergraduate and taught postgraduate projects. The project proposed here constitutes yet another building block in this research agenda.

Supervisors:

Dr. Noel E. O'Connor (AIC, DCU)

Keywords:

Computer Vision; Image Processing; 3D Special Effects;

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion