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Disney Research Creates Megastereo - Panoramas With Depth
mikejuk writes "Disney Research has made a breakthrough in implementing the technique of acquiring depth information from a simple camera scan of a scene. For a perfect panorama you need to rotate the camera around its optical center, i.e. just rotate the camera. However, if you just rotate the camera about itself you don't get any parallax effects — which is why it makes the stitching together easier. If you want to get 3D information from the sequence of shots you need parallax. This means rotating the camera mounted on an offset arm or just moving the camera along an arc in your outstretched hand. The big problem with this method is that the parallax makes it more difficult to fit the mosaic together, and this is the problem that the research team has been working on. Using a range of different scanning methods the results can be converted into high resolution panoramas automatically complete with 3D information."
Yes there are. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superresolution for methods and limitations. They are not yet in movie-scale but can convert a sequence of images from a single rigid target into a more detailed one if sub-pixel accurate registration is done between images.
It's based on this invention: http://www.vision.huji.ac.il/stereo/
Yael Pritch (who was involved in this project in Disney) was also involved in this research in the Hebrew University.
So it's a breakthrough, but a very old one and, more importantly, somebody else's
Sure, I see Abby do that on NCIS all the time.
It works best if it's a reflection on a pair of sunglasses, though.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Anytime someone reads Disney creates they should substitute the word "copies" until proven otherwise. Disney has a long and storied history of intellectual property theft when it was in their best interest. They are arguably the greatest hypocrites in the world about IP, even more so than Hollywood themselves. They are always the ones that hold the most radical of views in the MPAA and are very quick to hold condemn anyone else and take away their rights. They have also been stealing from the public domain and other individuals for ideas for decades. A quick Google search can find example upon example of their bad behavior.
Are there any algorithms out there that can take a movie, and produce a sharp photo
Of course. And it's free:
RegiStax
http://www.astronomie.be/registax/index.html
It's mostly used by astronomers, but works quite well for any series of images. Of course, it works on repeating frames. If things are moving, them they aren't 'repeating' and won't be processed correctly.