A Semi-automatic Algorithm for Applying the Ken Burns Effect

Abstract

In historical documentaries, video material often is not available. For this reason they are mainly made by using static material such as old photographs. To make this material more endearing and dynamic an effect known as ''Ken Burns Effect'' can be applied to the static images. It consists in a mix of panning and zooming effect applied to different objects which belong to an image. Hence, considerable user experience with photo and video editing software is required to successfully separate the objects from the background and to animate them to produce a high quality result. In this paper, we present an algorithm to apply Ken Burns effect with a minimal user interaction. The proposed solution exploits Statistical Region Merging segmentation algorithm to support the user in the process of separation of the objects from the background. Moreover, Inpainting algorithms are employed to fill the empty regions which becomes visible when an object is moved from its original position. Finally a random video can be produced from different ''animated'' images.