Parallax Photography: Creating 3D Cinematic Effects From Stills

Overview

This paper presents an approach to convert a small portion of a light field with extracted depth information into a cinematic effect with simulated, smooth camera motion that exhibits a sense of 3D parallax. The paper develops a taxonomy of the cinematic conventions of these effects, distilled from observations of documentary film footage and organized by the number of subjects of interest in the scene. The paper presents an automatic, content-aware approach to apply these cinematic conventions to an input light field. A face detector identifies subjects of interest. The paper then optimizes for a camera path that conforms to a cinematic convention, maximizes apparent parallax, and avoids missing information in the input.