Factored Time-Lapse Video

K. Sunkavalli, Matusik W, H. Pfister, and S. Rusinkiewicz.

ACM: ACM Trans. on Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH 2007), 2007.

We describe a method for converting time-lapse photography captured with outdoor cameras into Factored Time-Lapse Video (FTLV): a video in which time appears to move faster (i.e., lapsing) and where data at each pixel has been factored into shadow, illumination, and reflectance components. The factorization allows a user to easily relight the scene, recover a portion of the scene geometry (normals), and to perform advanced image editing operations. Our method is easy to implement, robust, and provides a compact representation with good reconstruction characteristics. We show results using several publicly available time-lapse sequences.