Special effects authoring using 2-D mesh models

We propose a video manipulation formalism that includes several special effects authoring tools such as animation, transfiguration, and augmented reality, based on a 2-D mesh-based video object representation. Texture maps of video objects are registered on a reference mesh, and then transfigured (rendered) by warping them using 2-D mesh mappings that are obtained by tracking the original sequence of video objects. The formalism also allows alpha blending of a moving object with another object using an alpha map sequence and a moving texture map. A VRML browser is used as an interactive user-interface to implement these manipulation tools. A Web demo is also available.