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First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

research.microsoft.com

81–90 of 184 posts

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#81
Okay please sign me up. I'm willing to pay hundreds of dollars for this software. I have hundreds of gigabytes of time lapse that I've taken that is just sitting there because of lack of ability to do something. I'd easily pay $200+ for this software right now just so I can have those videos and free up massive hard drive space.

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#82

Okay please sign me up. I'm willing to pay hundreds of dollars for this software. I have hundreds of gigabytes of time lapse that I've taken that is just sitting there because of lack of ability to do something. I'd easily pay $200+ for this software right now just so I can have those videos and free up massive hard drive space.

I'm not sure that this software is what you want. It takes regular speed and converts it to high speed. If you start with regular time lapse you'll need to speed it up even more - maybe as much as 10x. Now you'll have super fast time lapse.

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#83

I wonder how far you can get by using a "naive" timelapse of selecting frames from the video, but being smarter about which frames you choose. Rather than just choosing every nth frame, try to choose visually consistent frames by making the intervals between the frames loose, then apply conventional stabilization after the fact.

This was my initial thought about how they were doing this, but I don't think it's as applicable as it would seem. At 10x speed up, that's still ~3 frames from every second. I'd imagine a biker would spend at least a second turning to look down an intersecting road before continuing through. So that would be at least three frames where the perspective was heavily modified. It would have to select for right before and right after the head turn and ignore everything in between, which would probably create quite a jagged warp effect.

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#84
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly way better than the source video, but it's nothing close to what would come from a steadycam or dolly. You couldn't use this finished product in any kind of real production.

I wonder if you could apply it to higher-quality (i.e. already pretty stable) input to approach a steadycam though?

Stereo input from two cameras might help with constructing the 3D scene.

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#85
I downloaded the .mp4 file and watched at half-speed. It looks great at half-speed too, and much more realistic. I wonder why they couldn't have slowed it down a notch. Perhaps, as a research result, they are just staying true to their algorithm's output frame rate.

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#86

Okay please sign me up. I'm willing to pay hundreds of dollars for this software. I have hundreds of gigabytes of time lapse that I've taken that is just sitting there because of lack of ability to do something. I'd easily pay $200+ for this software right now just so I can have those videos and free up massive hard drive space.

I'm not sure that this software is what you want. It takes regular speed and converts it to high speed. If you start with regular time lapse you'll need to speed it up even more - maybe as much as 10x. Now you'll have super fast time lapse.

Actually, yes it's exactly what I want, I'm not sure why you would think I misunderstood what the software did. I have hundreds of gigabytes of 1 sec timelapse photos that could convert into pretty neat movies given what I saw.

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the paper listed on the page it looks like it takes about 305 hours to process a 10 minute video. The vast majority of that is during the "source selection" phase which takes 1 minute per frame of video.

Throw a couple engineers solely at optimizing perf and I'm sure it could be brought down.

Yeah, they say so themselves in the paper:

> "In this work, we were more interested in building a proof- of-concept system rather than optimizing for performance. As a result, our current implementation is slow. It is difficult to measure the exact timings, as we distributed parts of the SfM reconstruction and source selection to multiple machines on a cluster. Table 2 lists an informal summary of our computation times. We expect that substantial speedups are possible by replacing the incremental SfM reconstruction with a real-time SLAM system [Klein and Murray 2009], and finding a faster heuristic for preventing selecting of oc- cluded scene parts in the source selection. We leave these speed-ups to future work."

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#89

Mind blowing results! Although the name Hyper-lapse doesn't really convey the goal, it should be named Smooth-Lapse, because thats what its doing. Too much hyper-x already.

With the timelapse crowd, "hyperlapse" generally means a timelapse with a moving camera (eg. reddit.com/r/timelapse) . In that sense they are using the term correctly.

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#90
post #52

The result is quite simply breathtaking. It looks like something shot for a movie using a stabilised dollycam, the fact they were able to achieve the same thing using nothing but a GoPro, their software, and likely a week of post-processing on a high end desktop PC is simply amazing. I hope we see this technology actually become readily available. There might still be work to be done, but in general if they can repro…

It's striking but it's far more believable when you realize that they need to play at a much faster speed than the source, so they have tons of extra samples from which to extract information. They basically use all that data in the extra frames (that would otherwise simply get tossed away in a regular time-lapse) to construct a 3D scene. This wouldn't look nearly as good if they had to play it at normal speed.

On the flip side, it sounds like shooting at higher fps and using this to end up with a 24 or 60 fps result might end up with some cool results.
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