Animated Classic Mosaics from Video

Abstract

Abstract. Generating artificial classic mosaics from digital images is an area of NPR rendering that has recently seen several successful approaches. A sequence of mosaic images creates a unique and compelling animation style, however, there has been little work in this area. We address the problem of creating animated mosaics directly from real video sequences. As with any animation, the main challenge is to enforce temporal coherency between the frames. For this purpose, we develop a new motion segmentation algorithm. Our algorithm requires only a minimal help from the user. We pack the tiles into the discovered coherent motion layers, using color information in all the frames in a global manner. Occlusions and dis-occlusions are handled gracefully. We produce colorful, temporally coherent and uniquely appealing mosaic animations. We believe that our method is the first one to animate classic mosaics directly from video.