Looks extremely cool, if it works. From Andrew Mager (ZDNet):
What if you could draw some stick figures on a screen and somehow magically create a beautiful image montage?Well, it’s possible.
A group of students in China have created [Sketch2Photo], a project that does exactly what I just described: it takes a rough, hand-drawn sketch, scours the web for photos that match, and runs them through an algorithm, stitching it all together.
Here’s their video on this:
Thanks to my friend and computer science professor Haym Hirsh for the pointer.
Categories: Uncategorized
sitzpinkler says:
I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords.
Quote
November 7, 2009, 4:59 pmConstant says:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. A video is not that.
Quote
November 7, 2009, 5:37 pmjosh bornstein says:
Interesting. The video seems to suggest that–as part of the programme’s workflow, the objects will be automatically extracted from the backgrounds of the original images. That’s always the most difficult part of compositing, and I’ll be interested in seeing more examples of this.
Quote
November 7, 2009, 7:18 pmMike McDougal says:
I’m skeptical.
Quite frankly, I don’t believe it can do that or will be able to do it anytime remotely soon.
Quote
November 7, 2009, 7:54 pmMike Keenan says:
I haven’t seen much cutting edge software coming out of China. Only a matter of time, I suppose, but this seems almost like a joke.
Quote
November 8, 2009, 12:15 amOff Kilter says:
Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes...?
Quote
November 8, 2009, 12:34 amjosh bornstein says:
Off Kilter,
I can’t tell if your comment is tongue-in-cheek, or is serious. Assuming it was a serious comment: I think what Mike & Mike are saying (and I was implying) was that if this is true, it is an extraordinary advancement in extraction, which is often a very very difficult thing to do accurately [eg, hair, leaves). It’s not impossible that it’s come out of China, out-of-the-blue. Merely very very very very very improbable. Of course, I’d love for it to be true. But I’m from Xi’an. (The Chinese equivalent of, “I’m from Missouri.”)
If you were joking . . . sorry. (Impossible to tell for internet postings without icons to help.)
Quote
November 8, 2009, 2:00 amSoronel Haetir says:
I recall seeing something sorta like this for product development. The idea there was that someone would make a basic sketch of the piece they wanted and the program would do a search for matching items. I don’t know if that went anywhere or not though.
Quote
November 8, 2009, 5:40 pmBZ says:
What would be really interesting, assuming this is true, would be to put the resulting composited photo into Photoshop. Making it an interesting adjunct to the manual version of this.
Plus, the photo could then be turned into real art by using Corel’s Painter program (and a gifted artist).
Of course, the same thing can be done in Painter or Photoshop alone right now. The essence of Painter XI is the turning of crude work into finished, refined work. Having just gotten a very expensive, very complicated giclee inkjet painter, I’d like to try the Chinese program (if it exists).
Quote
November 9, 2009, 9:11 am