Animating Street View

Abstract: We present a system that automatically brings street view imagery to life by populating it with naturally behaving, animated pedestrians and vehicles. Our approach is to remove existing people and vehicles from the input image, insert moving objects with proper scale, angle, motion, and appearance, plan paths and traffic behavior, as well as render the scene with plausible occlusion and shadowing effects. The system achieves these by reconstructing the still image street scene, simulating crowd behavior, and rendering with consistent lighting, visibility, occlusions, and shadows. We demonstrate results on a diverse range of street scenes including regular still images and panoramas.