Star-effect simulation for photography


by Liu, D, Geng, H, Liu, T and Klette, R
Abstract:
This paper discusses the creation of star effects in captured night-time photos based on using depth information available by stereo vision. Star effects are an important design factor for night-time photos. Modern imaging technologies support that night-time photos can be taken free-hand, but star effects are not achievable for such camera settings. Self-calibration is an important feature of the presented star-effect simulation method. A photographer is assumed to take just an uncalibrated stereo image pair (i.e. a base and a match image), for example by taking two photos subsequently (e.g. by a mobile phone at about the same pose). For self-calibration we apply the following routine: extract a family of pairs of feature points, calibrate the stereo image pair by using those feature points, and calculate depth data by stereo matching. For creating the star effects, first we detect highlight regions in the base image. Second, we estimate the luminance according to available depth information. Third, we render star patterns with a chosen input texture. Basically we provide a complete tool which is easy to apply for the generation of a user-selected star texture. Minor variations can be introduced in star pattern rendering in order to achieve more natural and vivid looking star effects. By extensive experiments we verified that our rendering results are potentially similar to real-world star effect photos. We demonstrate some of our results, also for illustrating that they appear more natural than results achieved by existing commercial applications. We also illustrate that our method allows us to render more artistic star patterns not available in recorded photographs. In brief, this paper reports research on automatically simulating both photorealistic and non-photorealistic star effects.
Reference:
Star-effect simulation for photography (Liu, D, Geng, H, Liu, T and Klette, R), In Computers and Graphics (Pergamon), Elsevier Ltd, volume 61, 2016.
Bibtex Entry:
@article{liu2016star-effectphotography,
author = "Liu, D and Geng, H and Liu, T and Klette, R",
journal = "Computers and Graphics (Pergamon)",
month = "Dec",
pages = "19--28",
publisher = "Elsevier Ltd",
title = "Star-effect simulation for photography",
volume = "61",
year = "2016",
abstract = "This paper discusses the creation of star effects in captured night-time photos based on using depth information available by stereo vision. Star effects are an important design factor for night-time photos. Modern imaging technologies support that night-time photos can be taken free-hand, but star effects are not achievable for such camera settings. Self-calibration is an important feature of the presented star-effect simulation method. A photographer is assumed to take just an uncalibrated stereo image pair (i.e. a base and a match image), for example by taking two photos subsequently (e.g. by a mobile phone at about the same pose). For self-calibration we apply the following routine: extract a family of pairs of feature points, calibrate the stereo image pair by using those feature points, and calculate depth data by stereo matching. For creating the star effects, first we detect highlight regions in the base image. Second, we estimate the luminance according to available depth information. Third, we render star patterns with a chosen input texture. Basically we provide a complete tool which is easy to apply for the generation of a user-selected star texture. Minor variations can be introduced in star pattern rendering in order to achieve more natural and vivid looking star effects. By extensive experiments we verified that our rendering results are potentially similar to real-world star effect photos. We demonstrate some of our results, also for illustrating that they appear more natural than results achieved by existing commercial applications. We also illustrate that our method allows us to render more artistic star patterns not available in recorded photographs. In brief, this paper reports research on automatically simulating both photorealistic and non-photorealistic star effects.",
doi = "10.1016/j.cag.2016.08.010",
issn = "0097-8493",
keyword = "Computational photography",
keyword = "Star effect",
keyword = "Stereo vision",
language = "eng",
pii = "S0097849316301091",
day = "1",
}