Video based rendering of planar dynamic scenes

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to synthesize arbitrary views of a planar scene from a monocular video sequence of it. The 3-D direction of motion of the object is robustly estimated from the video sequence. Given this direction any other view of the object can be synthesized through a perspective projection approach, under assumptions of planarity. If the distance of the object from the camera is large, a planar approximation is reasonable even for non-planar scenes. Such a method has many important applications, one of them being gait recognition where a side view of the person is required. Our method can be used to synthesize the side-view of the person in case he/she does not present a side view to the camera. Since the planarity assumption is often an approximation, the effects of non-planarity can lead to inaccuracies in rendering and needs to be corrected for. Regions where this happens are examined and a simple technique based on weak perspective approximation is proposed to offset rendering inaccuracies. Examples of synthesized views using our method and performance evaluation are presented.