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Sketch2Photo – The Internet Phenomenon Uncovered
posted by Sneha Menon on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 10:22am Categories: BlogMar09
If you are living in the internet world, like most of us in e27, you would have definitely come across this beautiful yet simple video of an application that turns a sketch into a real photo by stitching together various pictures from websites. Just draw a rough sketch of sailboat, birds, beaches and wedding gown and there you get the picture-perfect or should I say perfect picture. Here, watch it to refresh your memory again.
Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.
The video got featured across various popular portals like Lifehacker and Gizmodo. After loads of difficulty, we were finally able to get hold of Dr.Ping Tan, One of the main man behind this intuitive app. Dr. Tan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at National University of Singapore. In this exclusive interview with e27, he shared about some of the technology behind this application.
Imaging Technology
Dr.Tan’s primary research interests has always included image based concepts. The technology behind Sketch2Photo involves two different components: Image search and Image stitching.
Image search consists of querying the myriad search engines that include Google, Bing, Yahoo and even Flickr. After which a filtering mechanism sets in, to remove the unwanted images. This is where Dr. Tan mentioned that in this application there are high false negatives and low false positives i.e the probability of the right images being discarded is higher than the wrong images being used.
Hybrid Blending
After the image search, comes the image stitching part which he refers to as hybrid blending. He capture images of similar lighting condition and illumination properties to blend cohesively. This particular technology generates numerical measurement for the final blending result and this blending score is used to optimize combination of different images.
Application Status
With this technology, he is not planning to make it into a software application as of now and has only recently filed the patent for it and has no motivation to commercialize it. When asked about the current status of the project, he mentioned that right now he just has “messy” research code and his students are working on a live demo of the software.
I for one can’t wait to sketch this and see what turns out :P
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5 Responses to “Sketch2Photo – The Internet Phenomenon Uncovered”
E27sg said :
Sketch2Photo – The Internet Phenomenon Uncovered http://bit.ly/91Br6x
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
snehamenon said :
Got to meet the man behind this viral phenomenon http://bit.ly/91Br6x (Disclaimer: Pls excuse my lame ass cartoon at the end of this post! )
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Dan said :
It looks a great system. It just does not sit right with me though especially the blending. I would not be surprised if it turns out to be a hoax but I hope it isn’t :)
Sneha said :
@Dan We really can’t expect it to be a perfect system as shown in the video. However, I do hope he makes the jump from research code to actual software application so that we can see it for ourselves :)
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