First-Person Hyper-lapse Videos

On the other hand, if it is actually generating a lot of "best guess" images to put between gaps that are too large to bridge (too many bad frames in a row) with the current frames I could see that taking a bit longer, but not a week.

This is good stuff, I like it, but it isn't as wow as the structure from motion work.

And for the folks saying just up the framerate, that won't really help because the head motion needs to back in the same position as a previous frame. It is a function of how much and at what frequency the motion you want to remove is.

This was on my todo list, item removed.

It appears that what they're doing here is simply extracting keyframes from the video, using them to compose a photosynth, then converting the autoplay of the synth to a video. If you load a photosynth and press "c", you can even see a the same point clouds and scene reconstruction seen on the research page.

Source: I worked on photosynth.

This would be possible. Although it would require providing some UI so the user could specify which parts should be sped up.

I've seen the Pjong Yang video, it is beautiful work. It requires very careful planning and shooting, and a lot of manual work to create such nice results. We're trying to make this easier for CASUAL, but it's still FAR away from the quality of professional hyperlapse.

I recall those childhood days when we could not explain why moon appeared to come along as our car moved. :-) Those differences in apparent speed betrays something about the distance of the object/point under consideration.

This is what this system does, by using the movement of the camera to interpolate a 3D map of the area around the path taken, as well as the original images that best adjust to the part of the 3D map being seen.

For a slightly more practical use this could be a tool to give people previews of hiking trails, tours, or routes they're about to take.

No you certainly wouldn't. Watch the technical video at the bottom of the page. It will explain why this is not trivial to do and why standard stabilisation technologies aren't useful to smooth out time lapses.

From the paper intro:

    Video stabilization algorithms could conceivably help create smoother
    hyper-lapse videos. Although there has been significant recent
    progress in video stabilization techniques (see Section 2),they do not
    perform well on casually captured hyper-lapse videos. The dramatically
    increased camera shake makes it difficult to track the motion between
    successive frames. Also, since all methods operate on a
    single-frame-in-single-frame-out basis, they would require dramatic
    amounts of cropping. Applying the video stabilization before
    decimating frames also does not work because the methods use
    relatively short time windows, so the amount of smoothing is
    insufficient to achieve smooth hyper-lapse results.

    As mentioned in our introduction, we also experimented with
    traditional video stabilization techniques, applying the stabilization
    both before and after the naive time-lapse frame decimation step. We
    tried several available algorithms, including the Warp Stabilizer in
    Adobe After Effects, Deshaker 1, and the Bundled Camera Paths method
    [Liu et al. 2013]. We found that they all produced very similar
    looking results and that neither variant (stabilizing before or after
    decimation) worked well, as demonstrated in our supplementary
    material. We also tried a more sophisticated temporal coarse-to-fine
    stabilization technique that stabilized the original video, then
    subsampled the frames in time by a small amount, and then repeated
    this process until the desired video length was reached. While this
    approach worked better than the previous two approaches (see the
    video), it still did not produce as smooth a path as the new technique
    developed in this paper, and significant distortion and wobble
    artifacts accumulated due to the repeated application of
    stabilization.