Animating Still Natural Images Using Warping

Abstract

From a single still image, a looping video could be generated by imparting subtle motion to objects in the image. The results are a hybrid of photography and video. They contain gentle motion in some objects, while the rest of the image remains still. Existing techniques are successful in animating such images. However, there are still some drawbacks that need to be investigated, such as too-large computation time necessary to retrieve the matched videos or the challenges of controlling the desired motion not only in terms of a single region but also in terms of consistency in regions. In this work, we address these issues by proposing an interactive system with a novel warping method. The key idea of our approach is to utilize user’s annotations to impart motion to certain objects. With two proposed phases in terms of preserve-curve-warping and cycle warping, a looping video is generated. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method via various experimental challenging results and evaluations. We show that with a simple and lightweight method, our system is able to deal with animating a still image’s problems and results in realistic motion and appealing videos. In addition, using our proposed system, it is easy to create plausible animation using simple user annotations without referencing the video database or machine learning models and allows ordinary users with minimal expertise to produce compelling results.