Dynamic Image Stacks

Our dynamic image stack interface. Users interactively explore a scene through a series of touch gestures in our tablet application. The top picture shows a typical interaction session as an embedded animation. (Animations can only be viewed in electronic form using a media-enabled PDF viewer such as Adobe Reader.) At the bottom, a series of static frames depicting portions of the same interaction. In the first view (1), the user taps on the foreground flower, and the display is updated to focus and expose the flower correctly (2). For areas where the user wants to specify the viewing parameters manually, a long-press exposes multiple sliders and a zoom loupe to allow for precise control (3); the user specifies that she wants to see a darker picture when she taps back on the same region (4). Finally the user taps the overexposed sky and the display is updated to reveal the sunset (6).

Since its invention, photography has been driven by a relatively fixed paradigm: capture, develop, and print. Even with the advent of digital photography, the photographic process still continues to focus on creating a single, final still image suitable for printing. This implicit association between a display pixel and a static RGB value can constrain a photographer's creative agency. We present dynamic image stacks, an interactive image viewer exploring what photography can become when this constraint is relaxed. Our system first captures a burst of images with varying capture parameters; then, in response to simple touch gestures on the image, our interactive viewer displays the best available image at the user's focus of attention. Exposure, focus, or white balance may be slightly compromised in the periphery, but the image parameters are optimal at the selected location. Dynamic image stacks turn photograph viewing into an interactive, exploratory experience that is engaging, evocative, and fun.

David E. Jacobs, Orazio Gallo, Kari Pulli. Dynamic Image Stacks. IEEE Workshop on Mobile Vision in conjunction with CVPR, June 2014.