Water surface modeling from a single viewpoint video

We introduce a video based approach for producing water surface models. Recent advances in this field output high quality results but require dedicated capturing devices and only work in limited conditions. In contrast, our method achieves a good trade off between the visual quality and the production cost: it automatically produces a visually plausible animation using a single viewpoint video as the input. Our approach is based on two discoveries: first, shape from shading (SFS) is adequate to capture the appearance and dynamic behaviour of the example water; second, shallow water model can be used to estimate a velocity field that produces complex surface dynamics. We will provide qualitative and quantitative evaluations of our method and demonstrate its good performance across a wide range of scenes.