Disney Research's interactive method synchronizes multiple videos

Editing tool aligns videos based on content rather than start/end times

2014-08-08

(Press-News.org) Disney Research Zurich has developed a new tool to help video editors synchronize multiple video clips based on the visual content of the videos, rather than relying on timecodes or other external markers. Current editing tools include a "snapping" interface that aligns video clips based on start-and-end times; by contrast, Disney Research's VideoSnapping method is based on an analysis of the content of the video. This makes it easier to synchronize multiple clips without such cues as global timecodes or audio, and even when clips are shot at different trajectories and different formats.

"Being able to synchronize multiple videos based only on visual similarities makes possible some exciting new applications," said Oliver Wang, research scientist at DRZ. "For instance, popular events today increasingly are recorded by a large number of cameras, such as smartphones; with VideoSnapping, we can efficiently create a single video from these crowdsourced video clips, even though they are shot from different positions on devices with different capture rates and may have little or no overlap between them."

Wang and the rest of the Disney Research Zurich team will present their findings at ACM SIGGRAPH 2014, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Aug. 10-14, in Vancouver, Canada.

"Our video alignment technology was originally inspired by an experimental short film we produced last year in Switzerland. In one shot we had to combine multiple takes of a scene from hand-guided cameras and there was no obvious way to do this easily," added Markus Gross, the director of Disney Research in Zurich and the film's producer.

Alignment of video clips is a task essential to a number of applications, including the compositing of multiple takes in movie production and visual effects, stitching together of video mosaics and combining multiple videos at different exposure levels to create high-dynamic range (HDR) videos.

Without timecodes or audio to guide temporal alignment of clips, editors now must manually align them, usually only with the help of start and endpoints or pre-specified markers. By contrast, with the VideoSnapping method, an editor has the option to drag a pair of video clips in a timeline-style interface, where an algorithm analyzes features in the video frames and determines the best match, causing the videos to snap into alignment. Alternately, temporal synchronization can be automatically computed, allowing for the method to scale to large numbers of clips without need for interaction.

"A major benefit of our temporal snapping is that it can greatly reduce the difficulty of finding good spatial alignments," said Alexander Sorkine-Hornung, Disney Research Zurich senior research scientist. "In fact, we have shown that by applying a simple, out-of-the-box method for spatial alignment after synchronization, we can achieve similar or better quality when compared to state-of-the-art spatiotemporal approaches."

This method doesn't work if the videos lack usable common features. But the researchers have identified possible workarounds. For instance, in a case where videos show two different people repeating a series of actions, synchronization is possible by using skeleton data extracted from Kinect sensors.

INFORMATION: In addition to Sorkine-Hornung and Wang, the research team included Disney Research Zurich's Christopher Schroers and Henning Zimmer and DRZ director Markus Gross. For more information on the project and explanatory video, visit the web site at http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/videosnapping.

About Disney Research Disney Research is a network of research laboratories supporting The Walt Disney Company. Its purpose is to pursue scientific and technological innovation to advance the company's broad media and entertainment efforts. Vice Presidents Jessica Hodgins and Markus Gross manage Disney Research facilities in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Zürich, and Boston and work closely with the Pixar and ILM research groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. Research topics include computer graphics, animation, video processing, computer vision, robotics, wireless & mobile computing, human-computer interaction, displays, behavioral economics, and machine learning.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Which Structure has optimal resistive switching characteristics?

2014-08-08

Resistance switching of random access memory has been widely explored due to its potential for replacement of ﬂash memory in the next-generation nonvolatile memory applications. One of the problems with resistive switching materials is the variations of switching parameters, which will deteriorate the device endurance. How do we solve this problem? Many methods have been tried to improve the resistive switching performances, such as doping in the insulator film, using appropriate electrodes and inserting interlayer between the electrode and the insulator ...

Work-related stress is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes

2014-08-08

Workplace stress can have a range of adverse effects on health with an increased risk of cardio-vascular diseases in the first line. However, to date, convincing evidence for a strong association between work stress and incident Type 2 diabetes mellitus is missing. Risk of diabetes about 45 percent higher As the team of scientists headed by Dr. Cornelia Huth and Prof. Karl-Heinz Ladwig has now discovered that individuals who are under a high level of pressure at work and at the same time perceive little control over the activities they perform face an about 45 percent ...

Northern Pacific's tropical anoxic zone might shrink from climate change

2014-08-08

A commonly held belief that global warming will diminish oxygen concentrations in the ocean looks like it may not be entirely true. According to new research published in Science magazine, just the opposite is likely the case in the eastern tropical northern Pacific, with its anoxic zone expected to shrink in coming decades because of climate change. An international team of scientists came to that surprising conclusion after completing a detailed assessment of changes since 1850 in the eastern tropical northern Pacific Ocean's oxygen minimum zone (OMZ). An ocean layer ...

How we form habits and change existing ones

2014-08-08

Much of our daily lives are taken up by habits that we've formed over our lifetime. An important characteristic of a habit is that it's automatic-- we don't always recognize habits in our own behavior. Studies show that about 40 percent of people's daily activities are performed each day in almost the same situations. Habits emerge through associative learning. "We find patterns of behavior that allow us to reach goals. We repeat what works, and when actions are repeated in a stable context, we form associations between cues and response," Wendy Wood explains in her session ...

What does 'diversity' mean to you? The answer may depend on your race

2014-08-08

Diversity in the workplace has been a contentious issue for many employers. In May 2014, Google disclosed that 70% of its employees are male, and in terms of racial diversity, the company is 61% White, 30% Asian, 3% Hispanic and 2% Black. Does that breakdown sound diverse to you? If not, what would an ideal diverse team look like? A study publishing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin sheds light on the complexity in defining diversity. Previous research has shown that higher levels of diversity are associated with more trust, increased feelings of safety and ...

What's the best way to brush teeth? Even dentists and dental associations don't agree

2014-08-08

Advice on how we should brush our teeth from dental associations and toothpaste companies is 'unacceptably inconsistent', finds new UCL (University College London) research. The study, published in the British Dental Journal, looked at the brushing advice given by dental associations across ten countries, toothpaste and toothbrush companies and in dental textbooks. They found a wide range of recommendations on what brushing method to use, how often to brush and for how long. The researchers found no clear consensus between the various sources, and a 'worrying' lack ...

Study measures steep coastal costs of China's GDP growth

2014-08-08

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study by a team of Chinese and American conservation biologists quantifies the serious consequences of China's recent economic growth on its coastal ecosystems. By several measures, 1978 was the beginning of a hugely successful surge in the nation's ability to produce economic value, but that surge brought accelerated degradation in the vitality of its coastal ecosystems. The combined analysis of economic growth, human activities and impacts, and environmental quality data appears in the journal Scientific Reports. It shows ...

Electrons moving in a magnetic field exhibit strange quantum behavior

2014-08-08

The dynamic behavior of electrons in magnetic fields is crucial for understanding physical processes, such as the quantum Hall effect, which are important in many areas of solid state physics, including electrical conductivity. Yet, there is much that remains unknown about exactly how electrons behave in a magnetic field. In research published today in Nature Communications, researchers Franco Nori and Konstantin Bliokh from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan, in collaboration with an experimental team in Austria, have made the first direct observations ...

Behind the scenes of genetics, leukemia in Down syndrome

2014-08-08

Children affected by trisomy 21 (or Down syndrome) are 50 to 500 times more likely to develop leukemia than other children. A group of geneticists working in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) focused for many years on the genetic characteristics of Down syndrome. They have sequenced the exome, a specific part of our genome, in a cohort of patients affected both by Down Syndrome and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (DS-ALL), a type of cancer relative to the cells of the immune system in the bone marrow. They were able to sketch an outline of ...

Study shows type 2 diabetics can live longer than people without the disease

2014-08-08

Patients treated with a drug widely prescribed for type 2 diabetes can live longer than people without the condition, a large-scale study involving over 180,000 people has shown. The findings indicate that a drug known as metformin, used to control glucose levels in the body and already known to exhibit anticancer properties, could offer prognostic and prophylactic benefits to people without diabetes. Published in a leading diabetes journal, Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism by scientists from Cardiff University, the study set out to compare the survival of diabetes ...

Disney Research's interactive method synchronizes multiple videos

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: