Seam-hiding for Looping Videos

Abstract

The proposed algorithm creates a seamless looping video clip from a real world video of an almost-cyclic motion. For a video that has repeating motion, such as a person on a trampoline, the first and last video frames may not precisely line up, even though the content is very similar. Playing back the video in a looping fashion can cause the re-start transition to jump out and appear discontinuous, both spatially and in terms of object velocity. Most work on video looping has sought to find the best re-set point in a longer video's timeline, but we start there, and modify the frames to hide the jump point. Our approach essentially fits a curve to the (x, y) and RGB coordinates of points in the scene, and then smooths those curves using gradient domain optimisation. We address important qualitative factors, balancing smoothness against preservation of the original trajectories/curves. Our modular system also incorporates video stabilisation and inpainting, to cope with more dynamic videos. For most videos within our scope, we found that automatic seam-hiding is succesful. For the cases in which the proposed system cannot satisfactorily produce a seamless loop, we hope our framework can be modified with improved components to achieve better results in the future.