Presentation of 3D Scenes Through Video Example

Using synthetic videos to present a 3D scene is a common requirement for architects, designers, engineers or Cultural Heritage professionals however it is usually time consuming and, in order to obtain high quality results, the support of a film maker/computer animation expert is necessary. We introduce an alternative approach that takes the 3D scene of interest and an example video as input, and automatically produces a video of the input scene that resembles the given video example. In other words, our algorithm allows the user to "replicate" an existing video, on a different 3D scene. We build on the intuition that a video sequence of a static environment is strongly characterized by its optical flow, or, in other words, that two videos are similar if their optical flows are similar. We therefore recast the problem as producing a video of the input scene whose optical flow is similar to the optical flow of the input video. Our intuition is supported by a user-study specifically designed to verify this statement. We have successfully tested our approach on several scenes and input videos, some of which are reported in the accompanying material of this paper.