DigiVFX
Digital Visual Effects, Spring 2012

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 Thursday
Classroom: CSIE Room 104
Instructor: Yung-Yu Chuang
Teaching assistant: Ming-Hsu Chang
                              Che-Han Chang
Office hours:
     TA: Wednesday 11:30~12:30 (Ming-Hsu Chang, Room 505).
            Friday 11:00-12:00 (Che-Han Chang, Room 506).
     Lecturer: Monday 17:30~18:20 (Room 527).
Textbook: We will use readings from books, journals and proceedings. However, Dr. Richard Szeliski's book Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications is closely relates to topics of this course. We recommend it as your main reference book.
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Grading:
  • programming assignments X 3 (60%)
    • Morphing (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)