/dolly-zoom

Dolly zoom without a zoom lens

Primary LanguagePythonCreative Commons Zero v1.0 UniversalCC0-1.0

Dolly zoom without Zoom lens

Dolly zoom (or the Vertigo effect) is an in-camera effect that is used in dramatic scenes to make the background appear collapsing on a foreground subject. See examples here.

This effect is usually achieved by employing a zoom lens on a camera mounted on the dolly and gradually moving the camera away from a subject while zooming in (or the other way around) so that the subject remains the same size whereas the background undergoes Perspective distortion.

The technique used in this project employs a simple cellphone camera without a zoom lens and tries to get the same results by means of cropping instead of zooming. Given the high-resolution of the contemporary cellphone camera, an image can be cropped to a fraction of its original size while still maintaining a decent resolution.

Dependencies

  • Python 2.7
  • Numpy
  • OpenCV 2

Usage

Run main.py for usage information

Credits and references

  1. Motivation - https://petapixel.com/2016/10/11/create-dolly-zoom-effect-post-no-zoom-lens-required/
  2. Georgia Tech CS 6476 Computational Photography - this was part of my final project for the course.