The meanings of certain acronyms and abbreviations used herein are given in Table 1.
TABLE 1Acronyms and Abbreviations0DZero Dimension1DOne Dimension2DTwo Dimension3DThree DimensionAVAudio VideoEXIFExchangeable Image File FormatHDHigh DefinitionJPEGJoint Photographic Experts GroupRAWRAW image fileTIFFTagged Image File FormatTVTelevisionXMLeXtensible Markup Language
The emergence of digital photography has developed new ways of consuming photographic media. Photographic paper is no longer the preferred way to consume photos. More and more people are now viewing their photos on electronic devices such as computers, netbooks, electronic tablets, electronic picture frames or even smartphones. However, the capabilities of those electronic screens are largely underused. Indeed, these devices commonly display still pictures or slideshows whereas they have powerful graphical and computational capabilities that could be used to enrich the media playback experience. Thus, while technology has evolved from black and white to colour and digital, the photography user experience has not really changed. It is still about displaying a still picture.
In an attempt to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks of existing still picture display devices, US patent application 2003/0222888 A1 discloses a method and a device that enable displaying a background image and a foreground object (e.g. a person) in a rest state for some period of time, some or all of the foreground object being then temporarily animated (e.g. the person occasionally winks, smiles or waves). The disclosed method requires several operations for segmenting the foreground object from the background. Indeed, a first operation is to record the background image without the object to be animated (the foreground object) in the scene. Then, the foreground object is recorded while in the scene. The foreground object is recorded at rest, which becomes the default background image displayed most of the time. Then the foreground object is recorded performing some action or actions that will be used to occasionally animate the default foreground image.