From a single still image, a looping video could be generated by imparting subtle motion to objects in the image. The results are a hybrid of photography and video. They contain gentle motion in some objects, while the rest of the image remains still. Existing techniques are successful in animating such images. However, there are still some drawbacks needed to investigate, such as the demand on a huge computation time in retrieving the matched videos, or the challenges in controlling the desired motion not only in terms of a single region but also in terms of consistency in regions. In this work, we address these issues by proposing an interactive system with a novel warping method. The key idea of our approach is to utilize user's annotations to impart motion to certain objects. With two proposed phases in terms of preserve-curve-warping and cycle warping, a looping video is generated. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method via various experimental results and evaluations. We show that with a simple and lightweight method, our system is able to deal with the animating still image's problems and achieves realistic motion and appealing videos. In addition, our proposed system is easy to create plausible animation using simple user annotations without referencing to video database or machine learning models and allows ordinary users with minimal expertise to explore compelling results.

Keywords -- animation, still images, cycle warping, warping, preserve curve warping

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