Daniel Sýkora is an Assistant Professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague. His main research interest is strongly coupled with his long-standing passion for hand-drawn animation. He developed numerous techniques which allow to eliminate repetitive and time consuming tasks while still preserve full creative freedom of manual work. To turn these research ideas into practical products Daniel intensively cooperates with studio Anifilm in Prague as well as renowned industrial partners such as Disney, Adobe, or TVPaint Development. His talk takes place on November 19, E104 at 2pm.

Adding Depth to Hand-drawn Images

Abstract: Recovering depth from a single image remains an open problem after decades of active research. In this talk we focus on a specific variant of the problem where the input image is hand-crafted line drawing. As opposed to previous attempts to provide complete 3D reconstruction either by imposing various geometric constraints or using sketch-based interfaces to produce a full 3D model incrementally, we seek for a specific kind of bas-relief approximation which is less complex to create while still sufficient for many important tasks that can arise in 2D pipelines. It enables to maintaining correct visibility and connectivity of individual parts during interactive shape manipulation, deformable image registration, and fragment composition. In the context of image enhancement it helps to improve perception of depth, generate 3D-like shading or even global illumination effects, and allows to produce stereoscopic imagery as well as source for 3D printing.