Future of Engineering

What's the common factor amongst these films - Spiderman, Hulk & Superman? You'd immediately say 'Super hero'. But what makes them super on screen? No, it's not their flying, diving and crashing skills that create a big impression. It's their special effects.

Production houses can afford to spend millions on special effects. But it is not possible for an amateur trying his/her first stint at photography and editing.

Unwrap Mosaics a prototype software from Microsoft offers a simple and easy solution. A video is simply a sequential collection of frames or still images. If special effects have to be applied to an object, each and every frame where the object appears has to be edited separately. This is a laborious and time consuming task.


Unwrap Mosaics was developed by Rav-Acha, Andrew Fitzgibbon, Pushmeet Kohli and Carsten Rother. It virtually strips the skin from a selected object in a video, producing a 2D surface that can be easily edited using photo-editing software.

Rav-Acha and his co-workers have successfully tested their software on a range of videos. "There are professional tools that can do these kind of edits but it's an incredibly skilled procedure," says Fitzgibbon. "We believe that with this procedure anyone should be able to edit video."

Using this software, the editor can sit back and relax after making changes to a single frame. The software takes care of applying the changes to all the frames. For instance, if you add a hat and boots to your cat video in frame one, the changes appear till the end of the video.

Now everybody has the chance to create a home edition of Hancock, the super guy of the 21st century.

Source - Unwrap Mosaics

Labels: Computer-Science