In recent years, research on 2D image manipulation has received
a huge amount of interest. Very powerful solutions for problems
such as matting [Sun et al. 2004], image completion [Drori et al.
2003], texture synthesis [Efros and Leung 1999], and rigid image
manipulation [Igarashi et al. 2005] have been presented. Based on
these and similar methods, it has now become possible to explore
interesting newideas to reanimate still pictures, for example, as done
by Chuang et al. [2005] in their article on animating pictures using
stochastic motion textures. They animate passive elements, such
as water and trees, that are subject to natural forces like wind. In
this article, we want to take the idea of creating animations directly
in image space one step further by making photographed persons
move.
One possible approach to address this problem would be the reconstruction
of a textured 3D model, and to animate this model
using classical animation techniques. This, however, would require
complex, fully textured 3D models which have to be created and
adapted per image. In particular, for highly detailed characters such
as the Scarecrow example shown in Figures 2 and 7, the required
manual model-adaption process would be impractical. Moreover, it
would be necessary to apply very sophisticated 3D rendering techniques
to realistically embed the 3D model into the 2D image so