A Mixed-Initiative Interface for Animating Static Pictures

We present an interactive tool to animate the visual elements of a static picture, based on simple sketch-based markup. While animated images enhance websites, infographics, logos, e-books, and social media, creating such animations from still pictures is difficult for novices and tedious for experts. Creating automatic tools is challenging due to ambiguities in object segmentation, relative depth ordering, and non-existent temporal information. With a few user drawn scribbles as input, our mixed initiative creative interface extracts repetitive texture elements in an image, and supports animating them. Our system also facilitates the creation of multiple layers to enhance depth cues in the animation. Finally, after analyzing the artwork during segmentation, several animation processes automatically generate kinetic textures that are spatio-temporally coherent with the source image. Our results, as well as feedback from our user evaluation, suggest that our system effectively allows illustrators and animators to add life to still images in a broad range of visual styles.