DigiVFX
Digital Visual Effects, Spring 2005
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Top 10 best selling movies$

1 Titantic*
2 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King*
3 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
4 Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
5 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers*
6 Jurrasic Park*
7 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
8 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring*
9 Finding Nemo
10 Independence Day*
* won Academic Visual Effects Awards
$ according to IMDB up to April 2004. Updated list can be found at here.

Course overview

With the help of digital technology, visual effects have been widely used in film production lately. For example, up to April 2004, the top ten all-time best selling movies are so-called "effects movies." Six of them even won Academic awards for their visual effects. This course will cover the techniques from computer graphics, computer vision and image processing with practical or potential usages in making visual effects.

Meeting time: 1:30pm-4:20pm every Wednesday
Classroom: CSIE Room 101
Instructor: Yung-Yu Chuang
Office hours: send me email to make an appointment or just drop by my office.
Textbook: We will use readings from books, journals and proceedings.

Grading:
  • programming assignments X 3 (55%)
    • image morphing (15%)
    • image stitching (20%)
    • matchmove (20%)
  • class scribe or paper report (10%)
  • class participation (5%)
  • final project: three options (30%)
    • research
    • system
    • film

Syllabus (topics we might cover):
  • Cameras
  • HDR image acquisition/display
  • Image warping/morphing
  • Image alignment
  • Tracking
  • Optical flow
  • Panorama
  • Motion estimation
  • Camera calibration
  • Match move
  • Structure from motion
  • Image-based modeling
  • Stereo vision
  • Multi-view stereo (bullet-time video)
  • Photometric stereo
  • 3D photography (active approach)
  • Matting and compositing
  • Image inpainting
  • Image fusion
  • Image segmentation
  • Texture synthesis (texture replacement)
  • Video texture
  • Video rewrite
  • Making face
  • Making human
  • Image-based rendering (layer depth image, lightfield)
  • Reflectance models
  • Realistic rendering (subsurface scattering/reflectance)
  • Image-based lighting