A Mid-level Description of Video, with Application to Non-photorealistic Animation

The contribution of this paper is a novel spatiotemporal description of real video sequences. Our description comprises a set of surfaces that separate objects in the video, and an accompanying database which describes objects in the video. We explain how to automatically process video into our description, and use it to solve a long-standing problem in Computer Graphics; that of automatically producing non-photorealistic (NPR) animations from video sequences. We show empirically that our description is highly compact relative to alternative coding schemes, and that our NPR animation technique out performs the current state-of-the-art in automatic video painting by about an order of magnitude, in terms of temporal coherence.