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Scientists Create Easier Way To Embed Objects Into Video
Ashutosh Saxena writes "Stanford artificial intelligence researchers have developed software that makes it easy to reach inside an existing video and place a photo on the wall so realistically that it looks like it was there from the beginning. The photo is not pasted on top of the existing video, but embedded in it. It works for videos as well — you can play a video on a wall inside your video. The technology can cheaply do some of the tricks normally performed by expensive commercial editing systems. The researchers suggest that anyone with a video camera might earn some spending money by agreeing to have unobtrusive corporate logos placed inside their videos before they are posted online."
I thought there was more than enough advertisement on YouTube as it was already.
The researchers suggest that anyone with a video camera might earn some spending money by agreeing to have unobtrusive corporate logos placed inside their videos before they are posted online.
Just like web surfers no longer even glance at banner ads anymore, people will learn to ignore any corporate logos in videos (even if they really ARE there in real life!).
Does anyone notice that the more pervasive advertising is, the less effective it is?
In other words, people build filters for it. I know within younger generations, advertising is almost invisible.
I recall older people at work asking me "did you notice that new ad on the webpage?"
To which I responded "uhm... our webpage has ads?"
Because I spend enough time on the web to have almost totally filtered them out (yeah, adblock does a bunch of that for me, but even without it....)
I don't think I could tell you after a TV show, who the sponsors were. Commercial time is just blank in my mind because I tune it out.
I don't think I've EVER clicked on an ad in a webpage. I don't know for sure, but television and radio advertising rarely affect my purchasing decisions, at least not in a way I can discern.
So, legitimately, how powerful is a wall-hanging logo for Pepsi in some random goofy youtube video ACTUALLY going to be?
Am I a total oddity in not even noticing most advertising?
unobtrusive corporate logos (emphasis mine)
You mean McCain will no longer have to be standing in front of a green screen for us to make him exciting?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Because if there's one thing we all need in our lives, it's more inane advertising plastered over every square inch of vertical surfaces.
... but no matter what I try to insert into a video, it just overlays the video with "This technology invented by Shampoo."
of the woman in the movie 'the corporation' that thought it was a great idea to get children to 'nag their parents more effective'. I just love the advertising business. not.
MP3 Search Engine
Yes! Now you too can star in your very own pr0n movie!
Ah, the wonders of software!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Now we will see an even greater number of bogus science experiments on Youtube.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Modern advertising/branding isn't about actively convincing you anymore. It's about creating a pervasive environment of exposure in which you become familiar with a brand/product/logo whatever. In the store people are then more likely to subconsciously reach for Tide or Tylenol (despite the fact that generics are composed of essentially the same active ingredients) because they are familiar.
Nobody pays much attention to TV commercials anymore, and haven't for some time. Have advertisers markedly decreased their buying of TV commercial time? No, because you don't have to pay attention for it to work.
Couldn't I use this to remove the objects/logos/animations just as effectively? I would likely pay for that!
When American football television broadcasts started featuring real-time "underlays" of such play-by-play landmarks as line of scrimmage and first down mark, a worried little voice at the back of my head wondered if someone would use this technology to underlay advertising. I think I've seen just such things (i.e., digitally-projected advertising hoardings in the video background, even logos "projected" into the playing field). Now this kind of stuff will be easy and ubiquitous.
As little as we can trust digital visual media now, it'll be even less trustworthy.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It is nice to see top universities working on better advertising. You know, I was thinking to myself just yesterday, "There is just not enough product placement in society. I hope someone makes it easier to put advertising in digital media."
Somebody tell the BertIsEvil guy.
It has massive implications for the advertising industry but amounts to visual deception. It takes the old saying 'you can't believe what you see' on TV to a whole new level. You could make something appear to have happened later than it actually did, or some time earlier, much much more easily. Spooky, and probably been around for years!
Pretty soon we'll see things like reporters being inserted into a Wolf Blitzer video. ... well, the possibilities are endless
Or yellow-lines being inserted into the video feed of football games
or wall board advertising being inserted into the video feed of hockey & baseball games.
or
at least they WERE endless... back in 1990
What is this, Slashdot-retro?
Great, an easier way to put black boxes over boobies.
Imagine a bewulf cluster of those systems at youtube putting anounces everywhere every second.
1. Initially from a computer forensics pov, it would be trivial to detect if a video has been altered, however i think with further improvements in the embedding technology where the actual advert piece is better rendered to take into account surrounding lighting conditions it might become more difficult, however not impossible to detect intentional modifications
2. Just as with current browser ad-blockers, the these ads can also be blocked out, in-fact the technology proves that complex camera conditions such as rotational pan(the heros examples) and occlusion (fat chick on couch) can be easily determined, so creating a blank out mask of a texture that is close to the surrounding surface would also be quiet doable, perhaps not real-time at the moment, but doable nonetheless, and most definitely live sometime in the future perhaps.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
I can't seem to understand how this is any different than applying a video\image overlay with opacity to an existing video? Can someone help me out?
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
"pervasive ads are less effective"
"i just use ad block"
"no one clicks on ads anymore"
blah blah blah
hey assholes: what do you think PAYS for all of the shiny fun websites you like? what do you think pays for slashdot? the hot air in your comments? your sense of self-regard?
not that you have to click on ads you don't like and never will, but maybe you can show the slightest sense of humility and simply shut up: SOMEONE is clicking them, and that someone is paying for the site you like. you think they are morons? your enjoyment of the websites you like is due to the "morons" who click on the ads you hate
in other words, don't look a gift horse in the mouth. all you have to do so that what pays for your websites continues paying for your websites is to learn to shut up when you are smart enough to know you should shut up
some of you apparently are not smart enough to know when to shut up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe these Stanford geeks don't watch football... that yellow first-down line is actually *not* painted on the field, it's inserted into the live video feed electronically. While doing it live requires some reasonable amount of processing power, doing it by non-real-time processing is pretty trivial (it's just a 3D texture map).
The technology to do this was commonly available in the mid-90's.
ummmm.... It sucks when all my wit is spent in the subject line of my response.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
This will lead to ads all over the place. Pepsi ads imbedded in The Maltese Falcon. iPod ads hanging on the wall above Col. Klink's desk. There'll be Penzoil decals on Starbuck's viper, a McDonalds opposite the Holodeck, and Nike swoosh logos on all of SG1's gear.
I'm guessing this uses a variation of the technology that they use to put the scrimmage and first down lines on the football fields.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Not to rain on their parade, but their demo shows reflective surfaces reflecting incorrectly at ~2:18+
Cool tech to b
thanks for the laugh
i really can't tell if you are a real moron or a clever troll, which makes the humor even better
bravo (fake?) retard!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
almost as if ads crawl out of the monitor and maul you
reading your words i feel like i'm dealing with one of those autistic kids who clap their ears and cower and stoop at the sound of a loud noise or bright light
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
More stimulation in the hour of mass media over-stimulation! I seriously hope we'll be able to use this technology. I like to watch porn, but it quickly gets boring and even repetitive (I know, that kind of is the point, to a certain extent), but it'd be more entertaining if I could project my favourite comedy show on the lady's stomach or buttocks. Also I like to watch the news but I don't have the time for all of these, so if we could project the porn-comedy combo in the screens in the background on CNN that would be great.
So I could at last laugh while playing with myself while at the same time wondering what this world is coming to!
You just got troll'd!
I bet google is beating their heads against the wall for not discovering it first.
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you would root for more insidious advertising, since you make money off of cleaning it up
'Well, I work in computer security and mmm "advertising" (usually in its more insidious forms) accounts for about 40% of the security problems in most organizations.'
hilarious and ignorant
let's see if i can play your game:
Wellll, I work for NSA and uuuhh aaah mmmm "trolls" (usually the smellier kind) account for 39.4202458% of terroristic threats to NATO member states.
pffft
1. grandiose inflation of importance
2. autistic speech cadence (aahh mmm)
3. bullshit made up statistics
based on those 3 points, you know what would be a better use of your time?
writing ad copy
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I looked to me like the point of the project was to allow any user to simply draw an area on some plane in the scene, and have the computer automatically track it through the video and matte out objects in front of it as well as estimate lighting changes. This can be any area, and doesn't have to be of a particular solid color. My guess is that you can easily underlay things on the football field because most of it is well... green.
makes ads that interfere with user experience, they will get less traffic, and less ad revenue
duh
its a self-correcting problem
what are you? the self appointed czar of ad appropriateness? don't worry about it. the ad experience will always be on the sideline, it will never overwhelm your browsing experience, because if it did, those websites that use such methods would see a decrease in revenue. what happens instead is that a maximum of ads will be placed in a maximum of intrusiveness, mindful of the audience's tolerance of either
look at ads in a magazine, or ads on tv. those are carefulyl calibrated rates of display so as to maximize revnue and minimize audience intolerance
meanwhile, i made a joke about ads jumping out the monitor and mauling you, and you took that as a serious exposition
wtf? billboards interfering with your drive? are you for real?
its like dealing with someone with some sort of nervous disorder
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The researchers suggest that anyone with a video camera might earn some spending money by agreeing to have unobtrusive corporate logos placed inside their videos before they are posted online.
More like Google will insert said logos into said videos upon your posting them on YouTube.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Now we can watch porn inside a tv in the porn movie!
On the contrary, advertising will flourish even more.
It seems that everyone can agree that there is a type of advertising which has as its main function to affect a person's subconscious tendencies toward a particular brand.
Now, if every brand employs this sort of advertising, to a more or less equal degree, then exactly which brand does a person settle on? If the advertising is done right on each brand's behalf, then statistically there will be roughly equal portions of the consumer base that will prefer any particular brand. Any new brand that enters the fray will be at a gross disadvantage unless they employ similar tactics. It will become economically impossible for them to sell their brand name product without a comparative advertising campaign. Also, if any existing brand ups its advertising effectiveness, then the other brands will have to follow suit, or risk losing large portions of the consumer base. So you see, more and better advertising begets more and better advertising, and a vicious cycle ensues.
More advertising agencies will emerge to handle the increasing volume of required advertising. These agencies will compete amongst themselves (through advertising) to be employed by the various brands. Existing agencies will need to increase their output further, too, and so advertisers will begin to pay other advertisers to advertise their advertising!
Eventually, we will reach the advertising event horizon! -- where it becomes economically infeasible to operate any business other than an advertising agency! Civilization will collapse and any subsequent civilizations will have archaeological sites dedicated to the "marketing era" strata of the earth's crust.
Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something. --Thomas A. Edison
Please, not those dancing cowboys again...
This, is nothing new. They've been doing it for years and for MOVING video, not fixed cameras. yeah it's cheap, but it's not Inventive.
You are way behind.
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
Augmented Reality isn't exactly a news, but talked about a lot lately. 3D tracking of planar surfaces from TFA is easiest kind of image registration, because planar surface 3d position could be restored from a single videoframe. All you have to do is identify 4+ permanent features on the surface, and you can consistently track it. In less calculating heavy cases, like rectangle tracking it could be done on the mobile phone. Feature tracking could be done on mobile too, but frame rate drop considerably.
A wonderful application for this would be videos like the Obama campaign video that your name appears all over -- the one where everyone voted but because YOU didn't bother to vote, McCain won by one vote. Your name appears all over the place. In graffiti, on Fox News, even President Bush congratulates you for being a patriot. And that lady who says she stood in line for five hours in the rain and that lazy muthufucku didn't bother to get his ass out of bed. Now imagine if an ingenious idea like this could be extended. You could do wonderful things with it. I have no idea what, but I'm sure there are plenty of things.
Doesn't Microsoft already own patents for embedding objects in videos with OLE? /silly
(despite the fact that generics are composed of essentially the same active ingredients)
Have you bought generic or third party hardware before? I'm thinking of a replacement car fender a body shop once tried to sell me. The steel was thinner than the original steel, and much more flexible. The rolled form of the fender didn't exactly line up with the rolled form of the original. The factory fender, on the other hand, was a perfect match to the original part. I'm sure the car would have *looked* like it was supposed to, but if you examine the fit and finish up close, it's evident that it's not a perfect match.
I think of that every time I buy a generic product. You pay less for a generic product for many reasons: the lack of a patent license or advertising are only two attributes of the lower cost. The materials may be inferior. The measurements may not be as precise. How many of those "low quality" attributes carry over to generic medicines? Am I getting the correct dosage? Is this product cut with food-grade corn starch or with clay dug out from the field next to the factory? Did they copy the binding agents that keep it from irritating my stomach, or did they use their own binding agents that might not work for me, and do those new agents have any interactions with the medicine?
I'm not saying generics are bad or ineffective -- I usually buy them. But I always think of the quality differences on the products I can see, and wonder about those differences that I can't.
John
> the generics are watered down, you can tell because they don't burn as bad
I think that's just the alcohol in it, not any of the active ingredients. But it is part of the marketing campaign, so you appear to be at least somewhat influenced by advertisements.
What would be really neat is having actors wear normal clothes when shooting a scene, and letting the costume staff layer them on in post production. But what would really be cool is some technology to remove the digital creatures from Star Wars. Oh wait.
"It's about creating a pervasive environment of exposure in which you become familiar with a brand/product/logo whatever. "
Browse Slashdot! It's the best.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
This could have some potentially interesting implications for the movie industry. Streaming a free copy of the film on the net is likely to leech most of the traffic from BitTorrent and other P2P protocols; One only needs to look at alluc.org and the late tv-links to see that. Combine that with *hundreds* of background adverts that don't even need to break the flow of the film, and they could well be on to a winner. How much would you pay for prominent product placement in a feature film?
The United States Congress announced today that Zombies are now on the Endangered species list due to sudden decrease in their food supply - Brains.
CIA Brainwashing Emporium closing shop due to worldwide shortage of Brains.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
if the intent is to produce modified video that cannot be detected computationally to be modified, that ought to be doable.
Iteratively improving it until the "detection" software can't detect anything, then publishing that...
Whatever it is that the detection software detects, CAN be treated until it's less significant than needed to notice it.
.
I'd be impressed if it wasn't a planar surface, or when the person walks through the background sub-video viewport that the lighting levels from the sub-video effects the lighting around the person walking in front of it instead of the obvious green screen look (look at the edges)as in the demo--that's why the current systems are expensive, they make it look like your really there (or it's there). I don't buy this as easier nor showing any wow-factor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYI5rHLpYFs
I remember reading about a similar technology quite awhile ago. It involved and algorithm that recreated the entire scene in 3D in order to figure out how to place the new image or video, but in that implementation even things such as reflections on a photo frame were preserved and the end result looked much less green-screeny.
I have no idea what the fuck a "head on" ad is. You were saying?
"...covering up the playboy posters in videos of your dorm room to send to your parents..."
You had to have RTFA for that one!
Ahh...gave myself away by knowing that. Dammit!....there must be a way around this.... :-)
BTW, I agree with you 100%. (your whole comment, not just that phrase)
It reeks of 'Google'(L. Page and S. Brin) want to be's, but appealing to corporate interests as a shortcut to vast riches.
I also admit it is cool tech, though I hope I can get it to run on Linux! (no meme joke intended!)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I wonder how the software is able to distinguish between shadows and occlusions.
Considering how pervasive ads already are in the "real" world, why not use this technology to scan existing video for known billboards and corporate logos and replace them with a nice a Matisse or Ansel Adams?
Removing ads from content seems more desirable for the consumer than adding more.
But some of us are really outside the bell curve, or really so pissed off at ads invasion that they intentionally buy OTHER product than the ad they see.
"But what if you could somehow reach inside the video and swap the offending photo for a snapshot of your current love? How perfect would that be?"
Sounds awful. Instead of learning to deal with unpleasant facts, you could just plaster over them, and rewrite history to the fashion of the day? I don't want to be so weak I can't deal with seeing one particular face in an old video.
I'm suspicious of all these new technologies that people seem to want to use simply an excuse for avoiding growth as a person.
Things to google for if you want to implement this yourself:
- "Point Matching" - when given two frames, which points are matching?
- "Five Point Relative Pose Problem" - this helps correlate camera motion from frame to frame when given 5 matching 2D points
- RANSAC - this helps filter out those matches that correspond to different moving objects - you'll burn through a lot of 5 point combinations and eventually the majority winner stays on.
Where I hope this area of technology goes is in the development of highly efficient HD codecs; I personally can't wait!
This is a great step towards Augmented Reality, where people can have these kinds of image transforms done in real time, before their very eyes. People would wear special glasses or perhaps someday, contact lenses, with integrated video cameras and processors. So you'd see what the video camera sees, at first. Then image processing systems like this one would kick in and allow your environment to have overlays and popups that you could respond to.
You wouldn't need a big-screen TV if any vertical surface can have a video image mapped to it. You wouldn't need a video phone if whoever you are chatting with can appear right in front of you. New kinds of games can mix real life and synthesized images as you move through the environment. Houses could be painted and decorated virtually, allowing remodeling without changing anything physically. Even people's appearance and clothing could be artificially altered or enhanced.
AR technology is still pretty far in the future, although the individual pieces are starting to appear. This AI image processing technology, once improved to where it can run in real time, is a big step forward.
"yeah" what?
I am not devoid of humor.
"This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia. It's all true." - Hunter S Thompson