Inspired in part by people who take pictures of themselves every day, showing how they change over a period of time, computer science researchers from the University of Washington have come up with technology that automatically creates time-lapse portraits from a large collection of photos.
If it sounds familiar, it’s because their research provided the basis for the Face Movie feature in Google’s Picasa photo editing and management program.
The “Photobios” research will be presented next week at the annual meeting of SIGGRAPH, the Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques, in Vancouver, B.C. Read their full paper here.
Google, Microsoft, Adobe and the National Science Foundation funded the research.
So what’s next? UW researcher Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and professor Steve Seitz (who is also an engineer at Google Seattle) are working on a related project that turns a collection of photos into a 3D model of the face.
More background in this UW news article.
