SparkleGeometry: Glitter Imaging for 3D Point Tracking / Cloudmaps from Static Ground-View Video

 Making sense of the world through unusual PSFs , aka imaging with Nature, I loooooove it !

SparkleGeometry: Glitter Imaging for 3D Point Tracking by Abigail Stylianou, Robert Pless

We consider a geometric inference problem for an imaging system consisting of a camera that views the world through a planar, rectangular sheet of glitter. We describe a procedure to calibrate this imaging geometry as a generalized camera which characterizes the subset of the light field viewed through each piece of glitter. We propose an easy to construct physical prototype and characterize its performance for estimating the 3D position of a moving point light source just by viewing the changing sparkle patterns visible on the glitter sheet. 

Cloudmaps from Static Ground-View Video by Nathan Jacobs, Scott Workman, Richard Souvenir

Cloud shadows dramatically a ect the appearance of outdoor scenes. We describe three approaches that use video of cloud shadows to estimate a cloudmap, a spatio-temporal function that represents the clouds passing over the scene. Two of the methods make assumptions about the camera and/or scene geometry. The third method uses techniques from manifold learning and does not require such assumptions. None of the methods require directly viewing the clouds, but instead use the pattern of intensity changes caused by the cloud shadows. An accurate estimate of the cloudmap has potential applications in solar power estimation and forecasting, surveillance, and graphics. We present a quantitative evaluation of our methods on synthetic scenes and show qualitative results on real scenes. We also demonstrate the use of a cloudmap for foreground object detection and video editing.

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