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First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

research.microsoft.com

61–70 of 184 posts

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#61
post #54
post #45

Video stabilization + more FPS / slower rate than the "every 10 frames timelapse" + feel good inspirational music = this I would guess that I could upload a shaky video to youtube to get it smoothed out, download it, and speed it up with similar to their rate and get similar results. The timelapse that they show that is so much worse uses way less frames of the raw footage (every 10th frame?) and goes way faster than…

>I would guess that I could upload a shaky video to youtube to get it smoothed out, download it, and speed it up with similar to their rate and get similar results. No you certainly wouldn't. Watch the technical video at the bottom of the page. It will explain why this is not trivial to do and why standard stabilisation technologies aren't useful to smooth out time lapses.

Well, I admit that I was pretty ignorant about the work being done on this project in regards to time-lapsed video. I guess I could add to my previous statement that they also cut out irrelevant frames (parts of the video that aren't in the camera path). I don't think this would be THAT difficult to do manually, but I admit that the technical video showing how they were able to graph/visualize the irrelevant frames is pretty cool, and the interesting resulting effects people are discussing in this thread (disappearing/appearing objects, the video game loading effects) are amusing.

I never said that it was trivial, just that similar stuff has already been done and made a "standard stabilization technology", automatically and easily just by uploading to youtube. It seems that youtube's techniques aren't necessarily completely different: there's a screenshot of an article from Google in this video [1] called "Auto-directed Video Stabilization With Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths". However, I do appreciate and shouldn't disrespect the specialized work being done for time-lapsed videos. My apologies.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgAdeuxkUyY

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#64
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.

Take a look at an older paper 'Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization'. That seems to do an ok job http://createdigitalmotion.com/2009/06/magical-3d-warping-te...

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#65
This is incredible. By watching the hyper lapse versions of the mountain climbing, you can clearly see which path is taken, are able to get glimpses of whatever paths are available. This would be a huge advantage for people learning how to rock climb. I can image that a similar situation would occur for many other activities. Great work!

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#66
post #32
post #17

Bloody amazing! Fantastic work! Release it. Release it soon. This is something that everyone would want. I see they have listed a Windows app coming. Is that Windows desktop app?

If I were them I would offer this as a web service: upload your video and have it converted for $1.

Embed it in OneDrive - let you apply it to your saved videos and add a watermark to it ("Hyperlapse Beta").

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#67
awww. I always have mixed feeling about a new microsoft funded tech. Something really really cool that I will never get to use/exploit/play with/anything.

The technical video breaks down some of the techniques they used. Global match graph is particularly interesting. This technique alone could lead to a big improvement in timelapses, by trying to select consistent changes between frames.

http://cg.cs.uni-bonn.de/aigaion2root/attachments/FastSimila... <- maybe this?

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#69
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch. I'll be going on a long bike ride in a month, and I was wondering if I could generate a hyperlapse of it... but it's going to be at least four hours, which doesn't bode well.

Back of the envelope, i get 7680 frames to process, one minute each which is just under $1300 for a medium windows azure instance. Not cheap, but probably doable. I'd bet you could spend a few hours fiddling with large memory instances versus medium, and find a sweet spot. Set aside $50-100 a month, it'll probably be a lot cheaper in a year. (assuming optimizations and cheaper cloud services)

[deleted]

Re: First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

#70
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were them I would offer this as a web service: upload your video and have it converted for $1.

$1 seems cheap.

The processing is quite cheap for a company with its own datacenters and computation clusters. Not so cheap for an individual though. So a user could pay a dollar while Microsoft is only spending pennies.
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