2D Video Editing for 3D Effects

We present a semi-interactive system for advanced video processing and editing. The basic idea is to partially recover planar regions in object space and to exploit this minimal pseudo-3D information in order to make perspectively correct modifications. Typical operations are to increase the quality of a low-resolution video by overlaying high-resolution photos of the same approximately planar object or to add or remove objects by copying them from other video streams and distorting them perspectively according to some planar reference geometry. The necessary user interaction is entirely in 2D and easy to perform even for untrained users. The key to our video processing functionality is a very robust and mostly automatic algorithm for the perspective registration of video frames and photos, which can be used as a very effective video stabilization tool even in the presence of fast and blurred motion. Explicit 3D reconstruction is thus avoided and replaced by image and video rectification. The technique is based on state-of-the-art feature tracking and homography matching. In complicated and ambiguous scenes, user interaction as simple as 2D brush strokes can be used to support the registration. In the stabilized video, the reference plane appears frozen which simplifies segmentation and matte extraction. We demonstrate our system for a number of quite challenging application scenarios such as video enhancement, background replacement, foreground removal and perspectively correct video cut and paste.