Video metamorphosis using dense flow fields

Abstract

When we perform video metamorphosis, it would be desirable to make smooth morphing transitions simultaneously along with the original motion in the image sequences. In this paper, we present a novel semi-automatic video morphing technique that exhibits this behavior. Our technique effectively exploits temporal coherence and automatic image matching. One-to-one dense mappings between pairs of corresponding frames are obtained by applying a compositing procedure and a hierarchical image matching technique. These dense mappings can be initialized with sparse frame-to-frame feature correspondences obtained semi-automatically by integrating a friendly user interface with a robust feature tracking algorithm. Experimental results show that our approach to video metamorphosis can produce superior results. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.