Feature-Based Volume Metamorphosis

Image metamorphosis, or image morphing, is a popular technique for creating a smooth transition between two images. For synthetic images, transforming and rendering the underlying three-dimensional (3D) models has a number of advantages over morphing between two pre-rendered images. In this paper we consider 3D metamorphosis applied to volume-based representations of objects. We discuss the issues which arise in volume morphing and present a method for creating morphs. Our morphing method has two components: first a warping of the two input volumes, then a blending of the resulting warped volumes. The warping component, an extension of Beier and Neely's image warping technique to 3D, is feature-based and allows fine user control, thus ensuring realistic looking intermediate objects. In addition, our warping method is amenable to an efficient approximation which gives a 50 times speedup and is computable to arbitrary accuracy. Also, our technique corrects the ghosting problem present in..