Slashdot Mirror
Algorithm Seamlessly Patches Holes In Images
Beetle B. writes in with research from Carnegie Mellon demonstrating a new way to replace arbitrarily shaped blank areas in an image with portions of images from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner. From the abstract: "In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user."
Uncensored Japanese pornography!
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
Broken or flaky video files. Nothing is more irritating than an mpeg, etc error that causes an entire block to go black and smear itself all over the place until the next keyframe. I don't expect realtime correction, but it would be nice if I could patch the file rather than do another six hour encode.
May the Maths Be with you!
It was as if a million fake celebrity pr0n websites cried and were suddenly silenced...
My blog
Slashdotted already.
BBC News coverage of the story is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6936444.stm
...call me when they make this into a plugin for Photoshop.
And if you dont have any pictures database, there's always GREYCstoration:t ion/index.htmlt ion/demonstration.html
http://www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/~dtschump/greycstora
It's pretty impressive:
http://www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/~dtschump/greycstora
and works with the gimp.
I take a picture of a hole?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
You never know what that "kinda-like" picture used to patch contains. You might get the opposite of what you want.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If any hole in the image can be filled with a part of another pic, can't you compress an image by replacing one piece at a time with a reference to a patch? Also, how about replacing with patches of higher resolution than the original? I realize it would all be technically lossy as hell, but the compression artifacts should not be very noticable to the human eye, right? Additionally, how about using this for movie compression? Filling in based on info from previous and next frame.
I may have to actually RTFA this time.
CSI Miami and NY have had infinite zoom capability with photos for years, and you excited about this? Bah.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user.
What are the "semantics" here?
Is this like google images, where the nearby HTML text determines the classification of the image [i.e ASCII-text as meta-data for images]?
Or is this a great big neural net of wavelet data which classifies the images mathematically?
PS: I have the same question about that infamous Photosynth/Sea Dragon demonstration:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
It takes an existing image and finds a very similar image in a huge catalog, then adds in a similarly-shaped piece to the existing image where applicable. So it's more like a puzzle solver than an image completion engine. If you don't have a huge, huge catalog of images, it won't really work for any given image as well as their samples.
stuff |
Due to recent advances at Carengie Mellon, you have all been made redundant by a computer algorithm. Sorry, progress is a biatch.
Yours,
some code and a database
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Instead of "You appear to be writing a letter. Should I format it for you?" I guess we'll get "You appear to be viewing Japanese pornography. Should I de-pixelate it for you?"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"this section has been intentionally left blank"
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
Although the summary says the method will fill arbitrary holes, at the link that claim is not made, and in their examples they delete specific picture elements.
I wonder if this is part of the beginning of a new, computationally-driven problem-solving paradigm. As more and more data is stored, and if search algorithms become more and more clever, the cost of "looking up" (computationally speaking) the answer to a problem might be lower than the cost of "remembering" (using local storage) or "figuring out" (using local CPU power) the answer.
This is already happening informally in the personal sphere, because of things like Google, recently amplified by the iPhone and its inevitable successors in the ubiquitous rapid-access web-tool field. As they say, these days, if you have a web browser, you hardly have to wonder about anything anymore.
Of course, problem solving by search isn't exactly a new paradigm, but it could be a newly-cheap paradigm.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
We need a new way to replace slashdotted servers with portions of articles from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner.
-- Boycott Shell
This is very cool, and I wonder how similar it is to what the brain does with respect to blind spots?
For those who don't know: each eye has a surprisingly large blind spot at the place where the optic nerve enters the eye. At reading distance, in the right eye, it's about four or five inches to the right of the spot at which you are gaving, and many textbooks and "fun with optical illusions"-type books will have a diagram... like the one on this web page... and directions for finding it. The blind spot is much larger than the dot on that web page, incidentally. If you explore, you'll find that... at the distance at which the dot disappears... the blind spot is nearly an inch wide and an inch-and-a-half high.
Even allowing for the fact that each eye has the blind spot in a different place so they fill in for each other, once you discover how big the blind spot is... and how relatively close to your position of gaze it is... you'll be astonished that almost nobody notices it until it is pointed out.
The brain does something more or less like filling in the blind spot. I say "more or less like" because it is very hard to answer the question "what do you see in the blind spot." For example, if you hold a computer keyboard at the right distance so that you're looking at the "G" key and the "K" key is in your blind spot, what do you see? Certainly not a black spot, certainly not a white spot, certainly not a "hole" or emptiness. Probably you have an impression of computer keys. Do you see a letter K? Certainly not, yet somehow you don't see a blank key, either.
Incidentally, I used to suffer from migraine headaches, and one of the symptoms for some people is the formation of blind spots which can be even larger than the "normal" blind spot, and can appear in central vision. One one memorable occasion, I was looking at the cover of a hardbound book, and I can tell you that when I looked at the title, my perception was the stamped, printed title disappeared, yet I would have sworn in a court of law that I still saw the cloth texture extending across the blind spot.
Although he does not specifically refer to it as a migraine illusion, I believe Lewis Carroll was known to be a migraineur, and in Chapter V of Through the Looking-Glass, "Wool and Water," Alice notices that "The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things -- but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite, empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold." Any migraineur who experiences central blind spots will recognize this description.
Hays and Efros' system--relatively-simple algorithm operating on a large database of previously-seen images--seems to me to be the sorta-kinda way in which one could imagine the brain working.
I wonder if there's any way to test this?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!