Video synthesis of arbitrary views for approximately planar scenes

In this paper, we propose a method to synthesize arbitrary views of a planar scene, given a monocular video sequence. The method is based on the availability of knowledge of the angle between the original and synthesized views. Such a method has many important applications, one of them being gait recognition. Gait recognition algorithms rely on the availability of an approximate side-view of the person. From a realistic viewpoint, such an assumption is impractical in surveillance applications and it is of interest to develop methods to synthesize a side view of the person, given an arbitrary view. For large distances from the camera, a planar approximation for the individual can be assumed. In this paper, we propose a perspective projection approach for recovering the direction of motion of the person purely from the video data, followed by synthesis of a new video sequence at a different angle. The algorithm works purely in the image and video domain, though 3D structure plays an implicit role in its theoretical justification. Examples of synthesized views using our method and performance evaluation are presented.