Interactive Multi-perspective Imagery from Photos and Videos

Photographs usually show a scene from a single perspective. However, as commonly seen in art, scenes and objects can be visualized from multiple perspectives. Making such images manually is time consuming and tedious. We propose a novel system for designing multi-perspective images and videos. First, the images in the input sequence are aligned using structure from motion. This enables us to track feature points across the sequence. Second, the user chooses portal polygons in a target image into which different perspectives are to be embedded. The corresponding image regions from the other images are then copied into these portals. Due to the tracking feature and automatic warping, this approach is considerably faster than current tools. We explore a wide range of artistic applications using our system with image and video data, such as looking around corners and up and down stair cases, recursive multi-perspective imaging, cubism and panoramas. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.