Processing video to appear like a cartoon presents us with two distinct problems. First we must work out how to paint strokes that are stable in time, otherwise the video appears to “flicker”. Second we must add “streak-lines”, “squash-and-stretch” effects, “anticipation” and all of the other effects real animators routinely use. This work solved both problems.
We were the first to show how to paint over video in a stable way. Our solution allows painting in many styles. Sometimes artists want an incoherent effect, provided they can control it; we provide that level of control. In fact artists can map animated paintings into regions, replace background and generally have real control over their output.
Another first for this work is the introduction of cartoon effects: streak-lines and so on. These effects require a significant change to the video content - balls that look real seem to stretch as they fly through the air and squash when they bounce.
This work has features in the lay press: CNN, Deutch TV, the Times, the Seattle Intelligensia, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and many news web-sites world wide. For an academic view see these papers, selected from a larger group of publications.
Papers
J. Collomosse, D. Rowntree, and P. Hall “Stroke surfaces: temporally coherent artistic animations from video”. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 11(5), 540-549, 2005.
J. Collomosse, D. Rowntree, and P. Hall, “Video Analysis for cartoon-like special effects” British Machine Vision Conference 2003, 749-758.
J. Collomosse and P.Hall, “Video motion analysis for the synthesis of dynamic cues and futurist art”, Graphical Models 2005, 68(5-6), 402-414.
