Date: Monday, August 13, 2007

Bad photos to become a thing of the past?

A new tool is being developed which will search online image libraries to replace unwanted parts of your photos with similar elements.

We’ve all done it; we think we’ve taken the perfect photo only to be scanning through your images later to discover there’s a great big lorry in the background of your perfect seascape idyll. Now you may be able to delete the offending image due to a clever tool being developed which searches online libraries for images similar to the one you have taken. Once it has located the image it will then fit in the elements of the photo you want to replace with the appropriate part. Therefore if you have taken a riverside embankment with a hill and sky in the background, and want to delete a lorry in the foreground, you highlight the lorry, delete it, and then the tool will fit in a similar river element from its archives in the foreground.

The programme has been developed by research teams at Carnegie Mellon University who have created an algorithm that uses sites like Flickr to help discover light sources, camera position and composition in a photo from over 2.3 million images. The tools then search for similar objects that occurred in the original photo in order to match up the images. During this search over 99.9% of the images in the database are rejected, and the algorithm only chooses the closest 200 for deeper scrutiny. These 200 images are then analysed for elements such as hillsides or buildings of the appropriate size and colour of the deleted object. Of these, the twenty best images then have their useable parts cropped and added to the scene, blending in well with the rest of the photo. The algorithm has been unveiled at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in San Diego, and photo enthusiasts wait with baited breath to see whether it will make it on to the open market.

Source: BBC News