MTRC Bath, UK

Shrink to Fit

The aim of this project is to investigate structuring digital live action images so that they can be treated equivalently to synthetic pictures. The method is to analyse pixel images in order to yield a vector-based form that can be rendered to produce a close approximation to the original pixel image. This has the merit of not being constrained by the pixel quantisation. Hence we can re-render the picture at different, even higher resolutions. We have already demonstrated giga-pixel images (32k by 32k). See the results below to see how difficult it can be to distinguish the original and the re-rendered vector form.

The main benefits are to film-makers manipulating and combining pictures from varying sources while still retaining full visual quality. Importantly, only PC computational power is needed. For comparison, Industrial Light and Magic have computer power second only to the US Department of Defense!

This work is also relevant to SVG, the web's scaleable vector graphics format; and it provides a new basis for any image processing technique.

Vector forms can also be rendered in a more stylised way, to produce a particular visual mood or to make the more radical transformation to a cartoon-like style. We expect this to influence our Comic Strip Rendering work.

Researchers

Professor Phil Willis (grant holder)
Dan Su (PhD student)
Sam Laidler (research assistant)

Research Results

Here is an example of a manipulated movie.
Here are examples of static images.
About the software we developed.
Related Publications
1. A Vector-based Representation for Image Warping
  Max Froumentin, Frédéric Labrosse, Philip Willis
  Computer Graphics Forum 19 (3) 2000
  Eurographics 00 Conference issue
  pp C385-C394 and C428
  ISSN 0167-7055
  PS file
2. Towards Continuous Image Representations
  Frédéric Labrosse and Philip Willis
  Proceedings of the Winter School of
  Computer Graphics and Visualisation `01
  University of West Bohemia, February 5th-9th, 2001.
  PS file
3. An Efficient 2.5D Rendering and Compositing System
  Max Froumentin and Philip Willis
  Computer Graphics Forum 18 (3) 1999
  Eurographics 99 Conference issue
  pp C385-C394 and C428
  ISSN 0167-7055
  PDF File
4. Fred Labrosse's web page. While he was at Bath,Fred was a major contributor to our scale-free image work.

Funding Agency

Originally funded by EPSRC as the "Shrink to Fit" project, closely related work continues to be funded by EPSRC, as part of the "Quasi3D" project. There has earlier been related funding from the European Union TMR Programme "PAVR" and particular staff have from time moved across these funds.