Space-Time Video Completion

NEW: This method is now part of the Content Aware Fill feature in Adobe Photoshop CS5.

A journal preprint from TPAMI March 2007, can be found here (pdf, 30MB).
A shorter version from CVPR 2004 is here (pdf, 3.5MB).

Abstract

We present a method for space-time completion of large space-time holes in video sequences of complex dynamic scenes. The missing portions are filled-in by sampling spatio-temporal patches from the available parts of the video, while enforcing global spatio-temporal consistency between all patches in and around the hole. This is obtained by posing the task of video completion and synthesis as a global optimization problem with a well-defined objective function.The consistent completion of static scene parts simultaneously with dynamic behaviors leads to realistic looking video sequences. Space-time video completion is useful for a variety of tasks, including, but not limited to:

• Sophisticated video removal (of undesired static or dynamic objects) by completing the appropriate static or dynamic background information.
• Correction of missing/corrupted video frames in old movies
• Synthesis of new video frames to add a visual story, modify it, or generate a new one. Some examples of these are shown in the paper.
• Video texture synthesis
• Full field-of-view stabilized video.

Sample videos:

Removal of a beach umbrella Raw data may be found here (zip, 9MB).
Removal of the jogging lady Raw data may be found here (zip, 5MB).
Reconstruction of three missing frames in a sequence
Removal of the waving lady Raw data may be found here (zip, 32MB).
Retouching of old Chaplin movie with simulated large "coffee stain"
Full field-of-view of stabilized video. The input was taken from this nice work