The Nonphotorealistic Camera

An anonymous reader writes "This article on Photo.Net describes a new type of imaging technique that finds depth discontinuities in real-world scenes with multiple flashes added to ordinary digital cameras. As depth discontinuities correspond to real 3D object boundaries, the resulting images look like line drawings. The same technique was used at this year's SIGGRAPH to create a live A-ha 'Take On Me' demo."

Comments

Re:Very interesting, but stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Try reading the article, the last 3 images use different techniques and are for comparison. Jeez

Does this have machine-vision applications?

[flechette_indigo]

I know it ain't really a 3d mapper but is it a quick way to grab info that could be later given a more in-depth scan?
Could this technology be modified to produce a good 3d mapper?
What's it's claim 2 fame? Shadow-comparison , right? Length-of-shadow=height-of-object, yes?

The old 'edge detection' bites again

[tod_miller]

You see, edge detection is funny.

Real world discontinuities, what they mean is, you run an edge detection algorithm on the distance signal.

This will not find edges in newspaper print.

No edge detection system is perfect - even this which uses spatial edges.

There is no real new technology, the multiple flash cameras are amazing and beat any faked edge detection hands down.

I do think they have awesome capabilities to allow computers to do what our eyes do, which is segment and label areas of our vision, and may make the blighters useful!

Computer aided sensory vision [audio descriptive alerts] could do amazing things for blind people, if we get there before they make artificial eyes better than 16x16 resolution.

Could be very useful

[taylorius]

This technique sounds like it could be useful for 3d reconstruction problems. The main issue in, for example shape from stereo algorithms is accurately finding depth discontinuities, and it can be nigh on impossible with a textureless, evenly lit surface.

Having said that, I'm not sure whether it would be better than existing solutions for that sort of thing, for example structured light.

Re:Very interesting, but stupid

[identity0]

Disclaimer: I am not a expert on graphics technology.

But look at the second image in the final set, it's clearly able to detect the edges of things. I'm not even sure what the filter in the last image is for.

And I'm not sure what you mean by "reproducing what can already bt produced". There are other multiple-image processing engines that can do line drawings and even 3d from multiple sources, but the thing is, they all require multiple cameras and calculating the slight offset in objects from different sources.

What's interesting about this new technique is that it uses the shadows from the flashes to determine edges and depth. Doing it entirely with lighting without multiple cameras is a really neat hack, imho.

Robot uses?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe no one's mentioned that this would probably be pretty good for robot image processing.

manuals

[millahtime]

This would be great for technical manual writing. Help you take pictures of the mechanicla interfaces.

Re:Quanta of image processing capability

[Various Assortments]

Or perhaps a leap between two completely different states. Hmm?

Focus across the whole filed of view

[Spoing]

With this, why have only one object in focus? Here's what I mean;

If autofocus (or any other method) from differnet angles allows for this enhancement, this technique can be used to 'cut' the image into different focus layers.

Piece the layers together, and you get a photo that has depth of field and is much sharper at each level.

The layer information could be stored seperately for later processing or combined with only a little fudging to give a weighted blur to the non-primary layer(s). Keeping the layers seperate and doing a comparison would also allow editing tricks such as cutting out objects at a specific depth or performing color enhancements on each level.