Realtime Video Based Water Surface Approximation

This paper describes an approach for automatically producing convincing water surfaces from video data in real time. Fluids simulation has long been studied in the Computer Graphics literature, but the methods developed are expensive and require input from highly trained artists. In contrast our method is a low cost Computer Vision based solution which requires only a single video as a source. Our output consists of an animated mesh of the water surface captured together with surface velocities and texture maps from the video data. As an example of what can be done with this data, a modified form of video textures is used to create naturalistic infinite transition loops of the captured water surface. We demonstrate our approach over a wide range of inputs, including quiescent lakes, breaking sea waves, and waterfalls. All source video we use are taken from a third-party publicly available database.