Friday, October 7, 2011

Pitch -- Found Footage Recorder on Android Phone




Robin Jian Feng

Smartphones bring tons of fun to modern life. One of the key features smartphones have is the camera. Besides shooting photos at any time and place, there are also many applications to add more interesting special effects.

However, most of the applications on mobile phones are only for still cameras or photo editors. In addition, the applications are mostly independent instead of real time. There are actually a lot of software on PC like AfterEffects that could deal with video processing, but what I want to make is an interesting plug-in to android phones that could make their video recorders more amazing, funny and interesting.

I would like to start from the effect of found footage. This is not only a typical art style in film industry, but it could also bring more fun to create self-made videos like old documentaries. Technically speaking, the color change and noises in the found footage are also a very interesting image processing topic that could be implemented by GPU algorithms.

I will do research into different types of found footage effects(for example, black and white, color, etc), then build models to simulate the noises, color changes, frame distortion and other features. Meanwhile, I will also implement the algorithm in parallel computation in GLSL with mobile phone GPUs.
In the next few weeks I will first run the project and debug on a simulator on PC and finally convert it to a real android platform. For the core algorithm, I will also test it with still images before applying it to videos. If there is more time, I will try to implement more effects besides found footage to make the plug-in multi-functional.
Below is some videos that use found footage effects.

http://vimeo.com/16766778
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwu5jI_2ayA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd6JYfR3C-0


Here We Go!

1 comment:

  1. If you find that the phone's GPUs are not fast enough, you could also implement this by sending frames to a server with a beefy GPU running CUDA. You'll have to balance the network latency vs. the speedup gained. One benefit is you will have similar performance across all phones regardless of their GPU.

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