Learning nonlinear manifolds of dynamic textures

Dynamic textures are sequences of images of moving scenes that show stationarity properties in time. Eg: waves, flame, fountain, etc. Recent attempts at generating, potentially, infinitely long sequences model the dynamic texture as a Linear Dynamic System. This assumes a linear correlation in the input sequence. Most real world sequences however, exhibit nonlinear correlation between frames. In this paper, we propose a technique of generating dynamic textures using a low dimension model that preserves the non-linear correlation. We use nonlinear dimensionality reduction to create an embedding of the input sequence. Using this embedding, a nonlinear mapping is learnt from the embedded space into the image input space. Any input is represented by a linear combination of nonlinear bases functions centered along the manifold in the embedded space. A spline is used to move along the input manifold in this embedded space as a similar manifold is created for the output. The nonlinear mapping learnt on the input is used to map this new manifold into a sequence in the image space. Output sequences, thus created, contain images never present in the original sequence and are very realistic.