We seek to answer the question: what can a motion-blurred image reveal about a scene's past, present, and future? Although motion blur obscures image details and degrades visual quality, it also encodes information about scene and camera motion during an exposure. Previous techniques leverage this information to estimate a sharp image from an input blurry one, or to predict a sequence of video frames showing what might have occurred at the moment of image capture. However, they rely on handcrafted priors or network architectures to resolve ambiguities in this inverse problem, and do not incorporate image and video priors on large-scale datasets. As such, existing methods struggle to reproduce complex scene dynamics and do not attempt to recover what occurred before or after an image was taken. Here, we introduce a new technique that repurposes a pre-trained video diffusion model trained on internet-scale datasets to recover videos revealing complex scene dynamics during the moment of capture and what might have occurred immediately into the past or future. Our approach is robust and versatile; it outperforms previous methods for this task, generalizes to challenging in-the-wild images, and supports downstream tasks such as recovering camera trajectories, object motion, and dynamic 3D scene structure. Code and data are available at blur2vid.github.io

Abstract. In this work we propose a photorealistic style transfer method for image and video that is based on vision science principles and on a recent mathematical formulation for the deterministic decoupling of sample statistics. The novel aspects of our approach include matching decoupled moments of higher order than in common style transfer approaches, and matching a descriptor of the power spectrum so as to characterize and transfer diffusion effects between source and target, which is something that has not been considered before in the literature. The results are of high visual quality, without spatio-temporal artifacts, and validation tests in the form of observer preference experiments show that our method compares very well with the state of the art. The computational complexity of the algorithm is low, and we propose a numerical implementation that is amenable for real-time video application. Finally, another contribution of our work is to point out that current deep learning approaches for photorealistic style transfer don’t really achieve photorealistic quality outside of limited examples, because the results too often show unacceptable visual artifacts.

In the quality evaluation of high dynamic range and wide color gamut (HDR/WCG) images, a number of works have concluded that native HDR metrics, such as HDR visual difference predictor (HDR-VDP), HDR video quality metric (HDR-VQM), or convolutional neural network (CNN)-based visibility metrics for HDR content, provide the best results. These metrics consider only the luminance component, but several color difference metrics have been specifically developed for, and validated with, HDR/WCG images. In this paper, we perform subjective evaluation experiments in a professional HDR/WCG production setting, under a real use case scenario. The results are quite relevant in that they show, firstly, that the performance of HDR metrics is worse than that of a classic, simple standard dynamic range (SDR) metric applied directly to the HDR content; and secondly, that the chrominance metrics specifically developed for HDR/WCG imaging have poor correlation with observer scores and are also outperformed by an SDR metric. Based on these findings, we show how a very simple framework for creating color HDR metrics, that uses only luminance SDR metrics, transfer functions, and classic color spaces, is able to consistently outperform, by a considerable margin, state-of-the-art HDR metrics on a varied set of HDR content, for both perceptual quantization (PQ) and Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) encoding, luminance and chroma distortions, and on different color spaces of common use.

Abstract Many challenges that deal with processing of HDR material remain very much open for the film industry, whose extremely demanding quality standards are not met by existing automatic methods. Therefore, when dealing with HDR content, substantial work by very skilled technicians has to be carried out at every step of the movie production chain. Based on recent findings and models from vision science, we propose in this work effective tone mapping and inverse tone mapping algorithms for production, post-production and exhibition. These methods are automatic and real-time, and they have been both fine-tuned and validated by cinema professionals, with psychophysical tests demonstrating that the proposed algorithms outperform both the academic and industrial state-of-the-art. We believe these methods bring the field closer to having fully automated solutions for important challenges for the cinema industry that are currently solved manually or sub-optimally. Another contribution of our research is to highlight the limitations of existing image quality metrics when applied to the tone mapping problem, as none of them, including two state-of-the-art deep learning metrics for image perception, are able to predict the preferences of the observers.

By capturing a more complete rendition of scene light than standard 2D cameras, light-field technology represents an important step towards closing the gap between live action cinematography and computer graphics. Light-field cameras accomplish this by simultaneously capturing the same scene under different angular configurations, providing directional information that allows for a multitude of post-production effects. Among the practical challenges related to capturing multiple images simultaneously, a very important problem is the fact that the different images do not perfectly match in terms of color, which severely complicates all further processing. In this work we adapt and extend to the light-field scenario a color stabilization method previously proposed for standard multi-camera shoots, and demonstrate experimentally that it provides an improvement over the state-of-the-art techniques for light-field imaging.