Animating and Interacting with Ancient Chinese Painting - Qingming Festival by the Riverside

In this paper, we introduce a novel method to display a famous Chinese ancient painting for the purpose of cultural heritage preservation. In order to animate the painting, some objects are extracted from the repainted painting and redrawn with three dimensional figures. Consequently the computer animation and Image-based rendering techniques are used to drive these objects animated. Furthermore, the users can interact with displayed painting, they can wave their hand to the virtual avatars in the ancient painting, and can get interactive responses. In addition, the avatars can be customized with the new algorithm we developed. In our algorithm, only one photo is required, and it can be captured on site. After the capturing, the 3D virtual character, or we called avatars, are created and integrated in the virtual environment.