MPhil Thesis Defence


"Animating Chinese Landscape Paintings and Panoramas"

By

Mr. Siu-Hang Chu


Abstract

Traditionally, making three-dimensional animations of a scene depicted in
a single image is difficult even for skilled animators. Computer vision
techniques cannot be applied to automatically extract three-dimensional
models from a single image; thus tedious trial-and-error manual approaches
are needed to build models that closely resemble the scene depicted in the
image.  Image-based rendering (IBR) has emerged as an attractive means for
producing stunningly realistic novel views of scenes from a set of
reference images, without first constructing the geometric models. In this
thesis, we introduce two IBR approaches for making fly-through or
walk-through animations from a single large landscape painting or
panorama. These images can either be regarded as having sub-scenes taken
from different perspective or as exhibiting a very wide view.  The first
technique constructs a simple global model for the entire input image and
builds a local model for each sub-scene using the TIP spidery mesh
interface.  An animation is generated by switching smoothly between a
local model and the global model while moving a virtual camera along an
animation path. Novel views are rendered by mapping the texture images,
which are extracted from the original image, onto the active model. The
second technique assumes that the image is taken from a fixed viewpoint
and constructs a unified model for the entire scene, thus eliminating the
need to perform model switching. In addition, we propose a minor
improvement on the TIP spidery mesh user interface to make better use of
visual clues presented in the image while modelling the background scene.


Date:			Monday, 20 August 2001

Time:			10:00a.m.-12:00noon

Venue:			Room 3006
			Lift 3

Committee Members:		Dr. Chiew-Lan Tai (Supervisor)
			Dr. Chi-Keung Tang (Chairman)
			Dr. Sunil Arya



**** ALL are Welcome ****