7.6. The Future

Camera tracking and photogrammetry are the main applications of computer vision in visual effects. But new techniques are making it into visual effects all the time.

Space carving techniques are starting to show up in visual effects. In the movie Minority Report, a 3D image of a person was projected in Tom Cruise's apartment. The camera roamed around the projection, and it needed to look like a true 3D display. The projected actor was filmed on a special green-screen stage, surrounded by many synchronized video cameras. Each camera was calibrated and fixed. Since the actor was surrounded by greenscreen, it was relatively simple to determine what part of each image was actor and what was background. From this, a view volume was formed. The intersection of all the view volumes of all the cameras produced a convex hull of the actor. Projecting the images onto the resulting geometry produced a remarkably realistic model of the person. This is just the beginning for this technique. At recent conferences, similar techniques are being developed to extract amazingly detailed deforming models of humans with concavities and everything.

It is a terribly exciting time to be involved in computer vision and visual effects. Over the years, the advantages of robust computer vision tools have become evident to the artists and the management. Computer vision techniques allow the artists to do things that previously were not possible and to do them faster and more efficiently, which makes management happy.