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Automated Mosaic-Stitched "Dotted Line Comics"
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My project is progressing, I've been refining my autostitching algorithm and working on modifying my homography-finding algorithm to account for the presence of the character in the scene. I'm going to take advantage of the sunny weather this weekend to shoot the scenes I'm going to be mosaicing together, but I have shot some images to use as test data in the meantime.
For reference, my approach is:
While The Family Circus was rarely a comic that I found particularly witty, amusing, or notable, there was a type of strip that occurred occasionally which engaged me. This was the "dotted line" strip, a sunday strip in which a dotted line would map a characters path across a panel.
Implementation Details
I'll be working from the basis of the autostitching mosaicing project completed earlier in the class. However, I'll be modifying the algorithm we used in a number of ways. The algorithm will need to find the character in each picture and pick a homography such that he/she's distorted as little as possible, while still warping the other points correctly enough.
I think that by smart choice of clothing and by taking reference shots from a few angles, we should be able to automatically find the character in the scene by feature matching. Once the character is found, we will find points on that character, and map them to their own location when computing the homography. I'll also exclude harris points on this character from being interest points during ANSM. Evaluating how effective a homography in RANSAC is should also take into account how much the character is transformed by it.
Once I've got a mosaic'd image, I'll need to draw dotted lines onto it. However, I don't want to just draw straight lines from character to character - that would look ugly and simple. Instead, I will find planes in the image by looking for parallelograms using edge finding, relationships between harris points/points of interest, and average color. Once we've found a number of parallelograms connecting a character location to another, we'll draw dotted splines that are in directions parallel to the sides of these parallelograms, to produce smooth, curving lines that follow the geometry of the scene. These splines may also be modified or parametrized based on the proximity of other points of interest to the path (indicating a feature or landmark that we may want the path to interact with).
After that, I may add notes/text by hand to help tell or enhance the story.
1. Gather pictures to be mosaic'd together, each containing the character.
2. Find the character in each image.
3. Run the autostitching algorithm, excluding the character from ANSM, evaluating a RANSAC set by how much the character is transformed, and mapping the characters points to themselves when computing the homography.
4. Mosaic the images together, blending such that the character is always fully opaque.
5. Draw dotted lines between character points by finding parallelograms and drawing parallel to their sides.
Project Description
An example of a "dotted line" strip.