Turning to the masters: motion capturing cartoons

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we present a technique we call "cartoon capture and retargeting" which we use to track the motion from traditionally animated cartoons and retarget it onto 3-D models, 2-D drawings, and photographs. By using animation as the source, we can produce new animations that are expressive, exaggerated or non-realistic.Cartoon capture transforms a digitized cartoon into a cartoon motion representation. Using a combination of affine transformation and key-shape interpolation, cartoon capture tracks non-rigid shape changes in cartoon layers. Cartoon retargeting translates this information into different output media. The result is an animation with a new look but with the movement of the original cartoon.

REFERENCES

• 1: ALEXA, M., AND MÜLLER, W. 2000. Representing animations by principal components. 411-418. ISSN 1067-7055.
• 2: Marc Alexa , Daniel Cohen-Or , David Levin, As-rigid-as-possible shape interpolation, Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.157-164, July 2000 [doi>10.1145/344779.344859]
• 3: James R. Bergen , P. Anandan , Keith J. Hanna , Rajesh Hingorani, Hierarchical Model-Based Motion Estimation, Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer Vision, p.237-252, May 19-22, 1992
• 4: BLACK, M., AND JEPSON, A., 1996. Eigentracking: robust matching and tracking of articulated objects using a view-based representation.
• 5: Volker Blanz , Thomas Vetter, A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces, Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.187-194, July 1999 [doi>10.1145/311535.311556]
• 6: BREGLER, C., AND OMOHUNDRO, S. 1994. Surface learning with applications to lipreading. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco, A. Cowan, Tesauro, Ed.
• 7: J Canny, A computational approach to edge detection, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, v.8 n.6, p.679-698, Nov. 1986 [doi>10.1109/TPAMI.1986.4767851]
• 8: GILL, P., MURRAY, W., AND WRIGHT, M. 1981. Practical Optimization. Academic Press, London, UK.
• 9: Michael Gleicher, Retargetting motion to new characters, Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.33-42, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/280814.280820]
• 10: HORN, B., AND SCHUNK, G. 1981. Determining optical flow. Artificial Intelligence 17.
• 11: JOLLIFE, I. T. 1986. Principal Components Analysis. New York: Springer.
• 12: LANITIS, A., TAYLOR, C., COOTES, T., AND AHMED, T. 1995. Automatic interpretation of human faces and hand gestures using flexible models. In International Workshop on Automatic Face- and Gesture-Recognition.
• 13: LUCAS, B., AND KANADE, T. 1981. An iterative image registration technique with an application to stereo vision. Proc. 7th Int. Joinnt Conf. on Art. Intell..
• 14: Tom Ngo , Doug Cutrell , Jenny Dana , Bruce Donald , Lorie Loeb , Shunhui Zhu, Accessible animation and customizable graphics via simplicial configuration modeling, Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.403-410, July 2000 [doi>10.1145/344779.344964]
• 15: Frederick I. Parke, Computer generated animation of faces, Proceedings of the ACM annual conference, August 01-01, 1972, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/800193.569955]
• 16: Frédéric Pighin , Jamie Hecker , Dani Lischinski , Richard Szeliski , David H. Salesin, Synthesizing realistic facial expressions from photographs, Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.75-84, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/280814.280825]
• 17: Zoran Popović , Andrew Witkin, Physically based motion transformation, Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.11-20, July 1999 [doi>10.1145/311535.311536]
• 18: SHI, J., AND TOMASI, C. 1994. Good features to track. In CVPR.
• 19: WHITAKER, H., AND HALAS, J. 1981. Timing for Animation. FOCAL PRESS LTD.
• 20: Jun-yong Noh , Ulrich Neumann, Expression cloning, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.277-288, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383290]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Animation

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.4 IMAGE PROCESSING AND COMPUTER VISION
        I.4.10 Image Representation
            Subjects: Morphological
      I.4.8 Scene Analysis
          Subjects: Motion

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
animation, computer vision, deformations, morphing, object tracking, shape blending, video