Part II Projects 2008–2009
In 2008–2009, I supervised three bachelor’s projects, which are known as Part II projects in Cambridge. This page briefly describes each project’s aims and motivations.
Interactively guided structure-from-motion (Malte Schwarzkopf)
User-created 3D content has become increasingly ubiquitous in virtual worlds such as Google Earth or SecondLife. Nonetheless, the process of building a 3D model of a real-world object generally still involves tedious manual labour.
This project presents a novel approach that unifies automatic structure-from-motion and interactive user input, making use of the human perception of an object to improve results. At the same time, an intuitive front-end allows a user to merely trace the outlines of an object in order to generate a 3D model of it.
Published as a poster at the Vision, Modelling and Visualisation Workshop 2009 in Braunschweig, Germany.
Automatic people removal from photographs (Leszek Świrski)
A common problem when taking photographs of public locations is that the view of at least some part of the scene is invariably blocked by a pedestrian. However, under the assumption that pedestrians move whereas stationary objects do not, with sufficient photos of the target one should have enough data to construct an unobstructed image of the target. But problems arise if the photos are from slightly different vantage points, taken with different settings (which is indeed likely for most cameras when set to auto).
This project resolves these problems in an automated manner. It aligns the input images if necessary, select the pedestrians and then replace them with the corresponding area from another photo, all in such a way as for the resulting image to look authentic.
Panorama Viewfinding (Aloysius Han)
The field of view of today’s cameras is fairly limited, and panoramas are one way of cheaply extending the field of view of digital photos. A panoramic image corresponds more closely to the human field of view and hence offers better real-world to image world correspondence. By capturing pictures with a field of view that is similar to that of human vision it allows for a more immersive image.
Rather than manually capturing a panorama and leaving the completeness of a panorama to chance, this project develops a “panorama viewfinder”. The viewfinder displays a live preview of the panorama, and extracts key photos automatically if they cover areas that have not been captured yet. This allows the photographer to sweep the camera back and forth over the scene to easily capture a complete panorama.