Animosaics

Abstract

Animated mosaics are a traditional form of stop-motion animation created by arranging and rearranging small objects or tiles from frame to frame. While this animation style is uniquely compelling, the traditional process of manually placing and then moving tiles in each frame is time-consuming and labourious. Recent work has proposed algorithms for static mosaics, but generating temporally coherent mosaic animations has remained open. In addition, previous techniques for temporal coherence allow non-photorealistic primitives to layer, blend, deform, or scale, techniques that are unsuitable for mosaic animations. This paper presents a new approach to temporal coherence and applies this to build a method for creating mosaic animations. Specifically, we characterize temporal coherence as the coordinated movement of groups of primitives. We describe a system for achieving this coordinated movement to create temporally coherent geometric packings of 2D shapes over time. We also show how to create static mosaics comprised of different tile shapes using area-based centroidal Voronoi diagrams.

Animated Classic Mosaics from Video

“…We are aware of only two methods [10,4] for mosaic animation. In [4], a moving mosaic is created by packing 3D volumes with temporally repeating animated shapes.…”

“…Our work is based on [10]. They make an observation that many devices for temporal coherence in NPR animation are based on the changes of primitive renderings units (i.e.…”

“…The input to their algorithm is an animated scene represented as a collection of 2D "containers", with known correspondences between containers in adjacent frames. We extend the work of [10] to real video sequences. Thus we must estimate the "containers" and their correspondence.…”

“…Creating animated mosaics manually is very labor intensive. However, there has been little work on creating mosaic animations automatically or interactively [10,4].…”

“…Our approach is inspired by [10], who were the first to realize the unique set of challenges for mosaic animation. In many NPR animation methods, in order to facilitate temporal coherence, the primitives are allowed to deform, scale, blend, etc.…”