Researching creating looping videos that don't look like they are looping videos (Think "Speed" loop without the glitch)

Microsoft Research - Hugues Hoppe's publications  - Automated video looping with progressive dynamism

Abstract: Given a short video we create a representation that captures a spectrum of looping videos with varying levels of dynamism, ranging from a static image to a highly animated loop. In such a progressively dynamic video, scene liveliness can be adjusted interactively using a slider control. Applications include background images and slideshows, where the desired level of activity may depend on personal taste or mood. The representation also provides a segmentation of the scene into independently looping regions, enabling interactive local adjustment over dynamism. For a landscape scene, this control might correspond to selective animation and deanimation of grass motion, water ripples, and swaying trees. Converting arbitrary video to looping content is a challenging research problem. Unlike prior work, we explore an optimization in which each pixel automatically determines its own looping period. The resulting nested segmentation of static and dynamic scene regions forms an extremely compact representation.

• paper
•  video
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• talk
• results
• comparisons
• progressive example
• demo tool

Not really sure what to tag this as, but I thought it was really kind of cool, I mean who doesn't love a little "..selective animation and deanimation of grass motion, water ripples, and swaying trees..?" :)

(via Kurt Shintaku's Blog - DOWNLOAD: “Video Loops” – A unique Animated GIF generator from Microsoft Research)