Live Sketch: Video-driven Dynamic Deformation of Static Drawings

Creating sketch animations using traditional tools requires special artistic skills, and is tedious even for trained professionals. To lower the barrier for creating sketch animations, we propose a new system, emphLive Sketch, which allows novice users to interactively bring static drawings to life by applying deformation-based animation effects that are extracted from video examples. Dynamic deformation is first extracted as a sparse set of moving control points from videos and then transferred to a static drawing. Our system addresses a few major technical challenges, such as motion extraction from video, video-to-sketch alignment, and many-to-one motion-driven sketch animation. While each of the sub-problems could be difficult to solve fully automatically, we present reliable solutions by combining new computational algorithms with intuitive user interactions. Our pilot study shows that our system allows both users with or without animation skills to easily add dynamic deformation to static drawings.