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Machine Vision Can Create Harry Potter-Style Photos for Muggles


In the Harry Potter films, images in newspapers often move.

Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed software that can animate the central character in a photograph while leaving the rest of the image untouched.

Credit: Tumblr

University of Washington in Seattle researchers have developed software that can animate the central character in a photograph while leaving the rest of the image untouched.

The researchers used a program called SMPL from a team at Microsoft and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, which begins with a two-dimensional (2D) cutout of a human body and superimposes a three-dimensional skeleton onto the shape. The skeleton can be animated to create the sense of movement, solving the problem of pose estimation for a limited set of circumstances.

The code needs to see a head-to-toe cutout of a body viewed from the front, and while it can handle some types of occlusions, it cannot handle more complex occlusions.

The researchers solved this problem by mapping a body-shaped mesh into 2D space and aligning it with the cutout using a warping algorithm; this identified specific parts of the body and warped them to match the cutout.

From Technology Review
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