This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind - Photosketch

This guy got downvoted for giving the most informative comment in this thread?

In today's hypercompetitive world, branding is key. Compare:

"Photorealistic image composition from simple sketches"

             vs.

"This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind - Photosketch"

Which one would you rather click on?

> the smiley should tell you this ^ is not a serious complaint.

Then why put the link at all?

I agree... But they have the source available if you can get to the site. Otherwise, here's the Google cache link:

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:http://cg.cs.tsinghua.ed...

The technical terms and researcher's names pass the Google sanity check, e.g. http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/prof_hu.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadir_Brady_saliency_detector.

We've been seeing some pretty fascinating developments in graphics and pattern recognition recently. A few days ago someone submitted that amazing Photoshop plugin that allows you to select a region and move it around seamlessly, and also fill in areas seamlessly. The demo showed the software filling in the broken areas of the Pantheon and the results were quite impressive. A combination of both technologies would be simply incredible.

Edit

The official site of the plugin is definitely down. Its probably overloaded by all the people who are interested in checking it out. ;)

Most of the parts have been done (a couple things look new, but just read through the list of SIGGRAPH papers for the last few years; the field is sprinting forward, as computers become fast enough to do this sort of computation), but putting it all together is pretty damn impressive.

Now, as hard as what's been done on the algorithms side, someone has to figure out a usable user interface for these tools, so that regular people can play with them.

My guess is that it's real, but that it doesn't usually work as well as the example images provided. If it really works for any kind of input sketch, then how come there are so many images of dogs catching frisbees and bears catching fish?

The Gizmodo story says that they presented it at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009. According to http://www.siggraph.org/asia2009/ that doesn't take place until December.

Surprisingly, not really. Computer vision has been moving along lately. This is good stuff, but incremental progress against the backdrop of other good stuff in the field.

A few times in the past few months the question of whether "all the good stuff" has been discovered or whether there's no progress left to be made came up, and computer vision has been one of my go-to examples of a field that has just been booming lately. Interestingly, digging in shows that it's still not "AI", just as you don't see any "AI" here, but there's still been a qualitative sea change in the past few years. I think the fact that a $1000 machine is now unbelievably powerful has been a real boon for the field.

Siggraph is home to some crazy presentations. I'm always surprised by the more impressive videos and papers, but on the other hand, never that surprised, just because it's always only one step crazier than the crazy thing from last year's.

the automated object recognition and extraction is what impresses me. everything else is a killer usage example of that core technology.

This is one of those SIGGRAPH papers that are like magic tricks -- unbelievable until you find out how they're done and what their limitations are.

There are existing projects that pair an image composition function with a tagged image database (like this one: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/photoclipart/). This project sounds like it adds a fitness function so that it can find an output image that looks good.

"Real" is relative. It might be "real" for a set of a hundred images but it might seriously bog-down or spit-out garbage if you tried to implement it for ten thousand, never mind ten million.

Image processing is full of things that sort-of work, that are impressive but not fully reliable.

Ha, true. FWIW, though, the character you're describing is played by Dustin Hoffman. Awesome movie, though.

I work in the VFX industry, and can confirm this is how we have been doing things for years.

Wait, custom porn is evil? I guess I'm the only one who's tired of all this cookie-cutter porn.

  probability of mis-matched images seems like it would be incredibly high

It would still be quite useful if the sketch narrowed the options to a list. Traditional point-n-click could refine/revise from there.

This innovation seems to be a shortcut mechanism based on pictographic gestures, where they also take the position, relative size into account. This is very nifty.

I cannot see how this would be faster than traditional Illustrator/Indesign workflows of selecting the elements from dropdowns, dragging to correct location and dragging the handles. If you use their sketching method, you are probably going to have to fall back to 2D drag'n'size methods post generation

In all seriousness, that's part of why I find it so interesting. The software works (I use the term loosely!) on downloaded images, ie it doesn't yet include a web client that does an image search for you.

So for movie purposes, you could save a lot of time using a (more polished) version of this to prepare your storyboards - shoot pictures of your selected or desirable actors, background plates that look like your desired locations, and major props. Draw stupid sketches and voila, you have rough photoboards. In conjunction with some other imaging technologies, it has massive possibilities. There's a saying that a film (especially a low budget one) lives or dies in pre-production; the more decisions you can make before you begin shooting, the less expensive the production process is and the more predictable and cheaper your post-production will be. Sure, quite a lot of Great Art happens on the spur of the moment, but serendipity is rare while dithering is common, and expensive. Adobe, for one, is pushing strongly to bring the use of their tools forward in the production process, so that the film is sketched out before shooting takes place and directors can spend more of their time 'filling in the blanks'.

What you mention (going from this to an actual movie) is obviously not practical now, but I'm happy to say that it's being reduced to an engineering problem - the fundamental technology to do most of what you describe already exists, and it's a matter of making it usable and timely. I will venture a guess that we'll be able to do this in clunky/very expensive form by 2015, and by 2020 it will be possible to make an entire feature film this way that looks about as good as a mid-90s low-budget sci-fi film - say, Escape from LA - at home.

tl;dr although this has been presented as an entertaining toy, with thematically-organized material there's a lot of near-term commercial potential.

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Yeah. I'm so in.

Sounds like hyperbole, but this technology has the potential to change the way people use language and speak and think.

Ever notice how many Americans use "like" as a preamble to a reenactment of a scene from a TV show, or an event, or even an abstracted, generalized occurrence? "It was like..." then on to the enactment. People wouldn't speak like this if it wasn't for ubiquitous video entertainment.

In David Brin's Uplift trilogy, uplifted sentient dolphins sometimes "spoke" to each other by mimicking echolocation returns and beaming pictures and scenes directly into each other's heads. If software like this gets good enough to compose scenes for us on the fly, it will drastically alter the way we speak, just as television did.

photoshop + 24hours of work = awesome image

photoshop + 1h of work = worthless image

this snake oil thing + 1h of work = so-so usable image

Good enough for display on TV news or a newspaper ?

Get me a picture of the president, put a girl in a red dress in his eye-line. Get me a picture of evil dictator - add some WMD in the background.

At the moment you need an intern to do this be much better when you can do it yourself.

ah, nothing better than a bit of weeding at sunset