In this New Year, no need to get bored watching old still images…soon you will be able to animate stationary characters in any image.
Thanks to Chung-Yi Weng, PhD student at the University of Washington, and some of his friends who created software called “Photo Wake-Up” that can animate the central character in a photograph while leaving the rest of the image untouched.
The team made use of a program called SMPL. They started with identifying a 2D subject in a single photo as input, and then superimposing a 3D skeleton onto it. “Our key technical contribution, then, is a method for constructing an animatable 3D model that matches the silhouette in a single photo,” the team clarified.
The team put in lot of efforts to get this final result; they used a warping algorithm for aligning the cutout and the skeleton. For correcting the errors and help with the animation’s texturing, team used a proprietary user interface.
Their software has given life to the boring photos
Weng, and his collaborators explained, “We believe the method not only enables new ways for people to enjoy and interact with photos, but also suggests a pathway to reconstructing a virtual avatar from a single image,”
