Special Effects in Film/Video Making: A New Media Initiative Project

We present a system and a set of tools for producing special effects in film/video making by applying image processing and human centered computing techniques. A combination of shot detection, object segmentation, background generation, and image warping techniques are used. The user selects the image frame or the object of interest, and the image warp transformation to be used from the GUI. Wrapping can be performed either on a whole image sequence or on an object of interest in the sequence. In the latter, the object is first segmented and its motion tracked. Object segmentation is achieved either by snakes or graph cuts. Steerable pyramid background generation is then used to fill in the portion cut from the foreground