This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind - Photosketch

Sigh...third time today and I only got one karma point for pointing it first. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=862216" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=862216</a> if you feel sympathetic :)<p>EDIT: gee guys, the smiley should tell you this ^ is not a serious complaint. I thought people might actually be interested in reading the actual paper v, since project page link has been inaccessible. Sheesh.<p>Site is down but this is the Siggraph paper: <a href="http://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/eletp/Papers/sigasia09_photosketch.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/eletp/Papers/sigasia09_pho...</a><p>I have downloaded the binaries (also requires openCV1.1, recently updated OpenCV2.0 doesn't work) and have made some progress, though it's very clunky and the instructions are, um...lacking. <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/files/" rel="nofollow">http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/files/</a> <a href="http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/" rel="nofollow">http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/</a>

The obligatory shark attacking a helicopter is a nice touch. This technology has epic potential in the LOLcat market.

I'm having a very hard time believing that this is real. If it is, they have just made breakthroughs in multiple domains in computer graphics, recognition, and composition at the same time. Here's hoping it's real.

Ariel Shamir (4th author listed in the paper) also worked on Seam Carving (<a href="http://www.seamcarving.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.seamcarving.com/</a>) and Improved Seam Carving (<a href="http://www.shaiavidan.org/papers/vidretLowRes.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.shaiavidan.org/papers/vidretLowRes.pdf</a>), two widely publicized papers from the past two years.

Hey, this is the technology from Wag The Dog.<p>De Niros character is a Hollywood producer, hired to produce a fake war in Albania to distract from a sex scandal before an election. At one point, he's directing news footage by shouting something like "there's a girl in front of a village, it's on fire .. hmm, no, more smoke.. her hair is too light. Can she have a cat? Show me cats" while having a technician type in the request and watching the result appear in real time.

A link to the original research paper that works: <a href="http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/main.htm" rel="nofollow">http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/main.htm</a>

This is going to make the copyright brigade go into apoplexy if it starts to become popular!

The probability of mis-matched images seems like it would be incredibly high, but if they manage to pull this off, it would be amazing.<p>However, I wonder about this technology being used for evil (custom porn). =/

If this could be extended to movies, the possibilities would be awesome. Just write a script for a movie, sketch out the different scenes and voila, a ready made rough of your new romantic comedy!<p>The program could be extended further to recycle old movies, and to replace the actors heads with new one.<p>I have to start writing a business plan for this right away. Please send me a message if you want to join in on this.

Did anyone get a chance to try it before their site went down so we can hear some first hand accounts?

Alright I may have a tendency to be overly excited about new technologies, but this is seriously amazing. The possibilities (and problems) that arise from this application are vast. This could completely revolutionize the stock photography industry and web design in general.<p>Copyright and privacy issues are my greatest concern though. For example, could you imagine seeing yourself as a digital model on some corporate website--doing something you never actually did. That is a scary thought in my opinion. I wonder if you could input your own pictures into the system and have it perform the same procedure though (I loathe the pen tool).

Wow, this is revolutionary. Anything that can use sophisticated technology to actually make things simpler for the end-user, instead of the other way around, is definitely a plus. I want to try this thing out right now.

If this is for real, then why can't the same thing be done for music? Drum a beat, whistle a tune, sing a few notes - and let the software extract best-matching samples from a library of millions of songs.

I don't get how this is going to replace photoshop.<p>The images will not look as good, or as clean as a regular photoshopped image, I doubt that automated image editing is that advanced right now.<p>The examples they gave, is probably the best that was available, I bet on average, the results don't look nearly as good or clean.<p>But hey, I could be wrong.

Gotta love the random deer in picture 5.

I really want to try this, but the actual site seems to be down now.

boring. i have been able to do this in emacs for over 10 years now

That picture with the weeding, the sunset, the sailboat and the birds is so unnatrual that it makes my soul twist.

Images aren't from flickr, not enough cats.