Video Enhancement Using Photographs

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

Photographic manipulation seems to be all the rage these days, especially with the recent release of the initial version of Photosynth, the 3D environment building photo software from Microsoft.  Some of the most useful techniques seem to come out of universities though.  A few years back, the University of Manchester’s Advanced Interfaces Group released Icarus, which was an amazing piece of move matching software that allowed the user to remove objects from video, generate 3D camera positions to composite 3D characters in a real video and much more.

More recently, GRAIL (the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory at the University of Washington) released the source code for it’s video enhancement project.  Although there is no useable demo, what they’ve displayed is quite impressive.  The software is able to enhance lower resolution video by interpolation with high resolution stills, as well as making user of HDR techniques and object removal and track/replace objects in a scene.

The aforementioned Icarus was fated to become a commercial application aimed at professional editors and animators after Pixel Farm purchased is about 5 years ago.

I hope that the fate for this project will be a little more consumer friendly.