Animating pictures of water scenes using video retrieval

We present a system to quickly and easily create an animation of water scenes in a single image. Our method relies on a database of videos of water scenes and video retrieval technique. Given an input image, alpha masks specifying regions of interest, and sketches specifying flow directions, our system first retrieves appropriate video candidates from the database and create the candidate animations for each region of interest as the composite of the input image and the retrieved videos: this process spends less than one minute by taking advantage of parallel distributed processing. Our system then allows the user to interactively control the speed of the desired animation and select the appropriate animation. After selecting the animation for all the regions, the resulting animation is completed. Finally, the user optionally applies a texture synthesis algorithm to recover the appearance of the input image. We demonstrate that our system allows the user to create a variety of animations of water scenes.