Fun! There’s new goodness that came out of Research! The UnWrap team (Alex Rav Acha - Weizmann institute of Science and Pushmeet Kohli, Carsten Rother and Andrew Fitzgibbon - Microsoft Research Cambridge) introduced a new representation for video which facilitates a number of common editing tasks. The representation has some of the power of a full reconstruction of 3D surface models from video, but is designed to be easy to recover from a priori unseen and uncalibrated footage. By modelling the image-formation process as a 2D-to-2D transformation from an object’s texture map to the image, modulated by an object-space occlusion mask, we can recover a representation which we term the “unwrap mosaic”. Many editing operations can be performed on the unwrap mosaic, and then re-composited into the original sequence, for example resizing objects, repainting textures, copying/cutting/pasting objects, and attaching effects layers to deforming objects.

In short, it’s a technology that allows you to play around with video footage and adjust the images by using an over-flowing layer. Pretty fun to try out :) I’ll post links to download files for the software as soon as I can share them.

Site: Microsoft Research | Check out the video