DigiVFX
Digital Visual Effects, Spring 2015

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: 2:20pm-5:10pm every Wednesday
Classroom: CSIE Room 104
Instructor: Yung-Yu Chuang
Teaching assistant: Wei-Sheng Lai
                           Lin-Chen Shen

TA Office hours:    Monday 15:00~17:00 (Wei-Sheng Lai, Room 501)
                               Friday 13:00~14:00 (Lin-Chen Shen, Room 506)
Textbook: We will use readings from books, journals and proceedings. However, two books closely cover topics of this course and they are recommended.They are Dr. Richard Szeliski's Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications and Prof. Rich Radke's Computer Vision for Visual Effects.
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Grading:
  • programming assignments X 3 (60%)
    • HDR (18%)
    • AutoStitch (24%)
    • MatchMove (18%)
  • class participation (5%)
  • final project: three options (35%)
    • research
    • system
    • film

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