CSE576 Project 1 Artifact

Computer scientists by day, bad ass skaters by night, Ned Friend and I routintely tear up the streets of Seattle, WA USA on our decks. Equipped with an Olympus digital camera that can take short AVI movies at 340x240 resolution we often capture our baddest movies on film. Here's a short avi of Ned pulling an ollie to manual across a gap at the Miller Community Center over in Capitol Hill.

Ned's Ollie to Manual
Using Apple's Quicktime player I captured 11 frames from the motion as well as a still image of the background.

Backdrop for the scene
Input Image Sequence


Frame 1	Frame 2	Frame 3	Frame 4	Frame 5	Frame 6	Frame 7	Frame 8	Frame 9	Frame 10	Frame 11

Then I used the Intelligent Scissors project to trace the contour of Ned in each of the images and create alpha mattes for each image.


Source Image	Image with Contour	Alpha Matte

Below are the masks for each image in the input sequence.

Image Mask Sequence

Frame 1 Frame 2 Frame 3 Frame 4 Frame 5 Frame 6 Frame 7 Frame 8 Frame 9 Frame 10 Frame 11

In Adobe Photoshop I composited all the images together into one single picture. I stacked each of the matte images one on top of another. I wanted only every few images to be in focus, so I increased the transparency of the "inbetween" images.

Finally, to create an image that rivaled those in skating magazines such as Thrasher, I blurred the transparent "inbetween" images and used a "Spherize" filter in Photoshop. This gave the image the ilussion that it was taken with a fish-eye lense and that Ned faded away during the inbetween images.

Of course, all of this would have been much easier if I had used Video Image Matting to extract Ned from each frame of the video.

This artifact is dedicated to one of the dopest games for the NES ever, Skate or Die by Electronic Arts.

Created April 17th, 2003 by Ben Stewart stewartb@cs.washington.edu
If you steal this images, give me credit sucka!