An approach to automatic creation of cinemagraphs

A cinemagraph is a new type of medium that infuses a static image with the dynamics of one particular region. It is in many ways intermediate between a photograph and a video, and has a number of attractive potential applications, such as the creation of dynamic scenes for games and interactive environments. However, creating cinemagraphs is time consuming and requires certain level of proficiency on photo editing techniques. In this paper, we present a fully automatic approach that creates cinemagraphs from video sequences. Specifically, we view cinemagraph construction as a constrained optimization problem that seeks a sub-volume in video with the maximum cumulative flow fields. The problem can be efficiently solved by a branch and-bound search scheme. A user survey is conducted to understand user preferences and demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach. The findings of this study should provide information for various design choices for an easy and versatile authoring tool for cinemagraphs.