Video motion stylization by 2D rigidification

Abstract

This paper introduces a video stylization method that increases the apparent rigidity of motion. Existing stylization methods often retain the 3D motion of the original video, making the result look like a 3D scene covered in paint rather than a 2D painting of a scene. In contrast, traditional hand-drawn animations often exhibit simplified in-plane motion, such as in the case of cut-out animations where the animator moves pieces of paper from frame to frame. Inspired by this technique, we propose to modify a video such that its content undergoes 2D rigid transforms. To achieve this goal, our approach applies motion segmentation and optimization to best approximate the input optical flow with piecewise-rigid transforms, and re-renders the video such that its content follows the simplified motion. The output of our method is a new video and its optical flow, which can be fed to any existing video stylization algorithm.