PRODUCING ANIMATED SCENES FROM STILL IMAGES

A strategy is described for producing an animated scene from multiple high resolution still images. The strategy involves: creating a graph based on an analysis of similarity among the plural still images; performing partial temporal order recovery to define a partial ordering among the plural still images; and extracting an output sequence from the plural still images using second-order Markov Chain analysis, using the partial ordering as a reference. The strategy can perform the above-described analysis with respect to multiple independent animated regions (IARs) within the still images. Further, the strategy can decompose any IAR with a significant amount of motion into multiple semi-independent animated regions (SIARs). The SIARs are defined to be weakly interdependent.