Making space for time in time-lapse photography

This paper presents a visualization technique that transforms regular time-lapse footage into composite images, accentuating periodic and long-term events. Traditional time-lapse techniques convey only an accelerated view of the local passage of time, making them most appropriate for studying events coincident in time. Our approach provides a controlled means of trading in the spatial resolution of the output image to gain temporal expressiveness. The input material is sampled – not necessarily linearly – and combined to produce summary visualization of events. Long-term trends, as well as periodic events, become apparent using this technique, making it an effective aid for educational settings (e.g., demonstrating how seasonal phenomena unfold), summarization tasks, and browsing and searching large stores of time-lapse video. We demonstrate this visualization technique on a data set captured over a four month period.