A modern day video flip-book: creating a printable representation from time-based media

In this paper, we describe a method for storing an entire video, animation sequence, or any other media type, on paper. The method is based on printing a key frame from a video on paper along with a barcode that encodes the motion information and other auxiliary information in MPEG-4 format. Unlike other video barcode systems in the prior art, a barcode in our system does not contain a link to the video clip; instead it contains motion information. A client device applies the motion information to an image of the video key frame to obtain full motion video. Therefore, the paper document is a self contained representation of a video clip and access to a server is not required. We modified an MPEG-4 [1] encoder and decoder to implement the video flip-book encoder and decoder. Experiments show that it is possible to encode several seconds of video on paper using our method. This is sufficient to create small animations for some printed materials such as video greeting cards and children's books.