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PhotoSketch Image Manipulation Tool Taking the World by Storm
PhotoSketch, a new image manipulation program that combines stick-figure sketches, internet image search and pattern matching, seems to be spreading like wildfire. Created by five Chinese students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore, the tool takes a basic sketch and simple labels and turns it into a polished image. "Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images," say the PhotoSketch team in an abstract outlining the tool. "We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful."
Since the link to homepage in the article is some old-dated one, here's a correct one:
And the binaries (it's a few command line programs, so no fancy UI)
This image looks sketched. I can tell from a few of the pixels, and from having seen a few sketches in my time.
If you sketch a big circle and two hands, will it come up with goatse?
The authors of the program--Tao Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ping Tan, Ariel Shamir, and Shi-Min Hu at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, and the National University of Singapore--presented it at Siggraph Asia 2009.
An event that will be remembered forever in the History of Humanity as the day in which a million dorks were finally able to put themselves in X-rated positions with Megan Fox.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Now NO ONE will believe the pics of me with Jessica Biel, Kate Beckinsale and Dolly Madison are real!
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
This will make things way easier for Iran and North Korea.
How does it know which part of the photographs to mask out prior to composition? Have they pre-masked all the images in its database?
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
I tried to draw a picture of a man with an erection. I labeled him "porn guy". Then I drew a picture of a woman with her mouth open and labeled her "porn whore cumshot".
The composite picture was fine except that the man and the woman were far apart from each other. In addition, even if I were to draw them closer together (hey, I'm working with a mouse here), the result would still have been sized incorrectly.
This technology holds lots of promise and is already pretty cool. I hope they can work out the kinks.
I think that's the only approprate response here.
The reality is that it was only a matter of time before someone came up with something like this, with examples like Microsoft Photosynth, but this is an unbelievable implementation.
I'm not 100% sure, but I can definitely see the potential for Google to snatch this up really fast and incorporate it into Picasa or even google image search or something. The fact that something like this allows anyone (not just artists) to come up with novel images with minimal effort is fantastic. I do wonder how canned the images were though. IE: did they GIS for an image first, then use the image as a basis to draw the stick figure, knowing that their algorithm would pick the image they selected in the first place? I would like to see a live demo with an unplanned audience member doing the drawing. Then I'll really be impressed.
And this coming from China, there is no malicious code buried somewhere?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
In related news anyone supporting current copyright laws have reinvigorated the economy after having to go out and purchase new pants. Cue the next great debate about copyright as we continue to try to shoe horn old ideas into the new world.
Tubgirl and goatse.cs are gonna crash.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Soon I can write a story and then I just compile it and it will show sniplets of existing movies or rendered characters and woha it's converted to a real movie even with end credits: Directed and written by ME ME
Oh I can't wait.
That's pretty damn cool. It reminds me of scene completion, which is another take on the same idea - combining images from Flickr to create new images according to a brief sketch.
Having just taken a quick look through the config files and readme from the binary.zip file, it's pretty obvious this is very much a Proof of Concept release. You need to hard-code the number of sketched items, label them each in the config file, download the potential matched images to a specified directory, etc. It involves enough guess-work and too little documentation for me to proceed further, which is unfortunate. Has anyone else actually gotten it to work as described to confirm it does what it claims it can?
Anybody else see what's wrong with this picture?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images
Sounds like they took all the fun out of it to me....
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
1) Open Source?
2) Could the algorithm be used to find existing images similar to the one you just drew?
3) When is a demo of this thing available?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
This seems to be either a hoax or will be extremely limited in ways they aren't discussing, as to have little use. If the examples they are showing are real, the image data set they are pulling from must have been manually processed and adorned with hand-made metadata.
This falls too much into the "too good to be true" category for me to believe it.
Aren't mashups already in a copyright gray area?
The application is very impressive, as far as the video goes. It shows that a human process of recombining existing material based on a hunch.
Problem is, searches (for base data set) for CC Share alike / commercially usable is a best spotty (many artists don't care much about explaining the image rights, and most others are jerks).
So in practice, this will only be useful for private entertainment, maybe prototyping, but not for professional use.
It's a great idea, actually a pretty innovative one, but it will break when facing western establishment.
But then again, it is created in China, so they'll have more space to act on it, which is kind of ironic taking in account their political system.
An interesting point: This research is being done in China, not the United States. Whatever happened to basic research being done in the US? Today's PARC laboratory is not in the US, but appears is in China.
This is not a good thing for people who live in the US. America's increasing dependence on outsourcing is destroying the US' capability to be competitive in today's environment.
The Harvard Business Review has an excellent article about how America is destorying its own future.
MaraDNS is an open-source DNS server.
Great! They create the perfect pr0n tool and disable the feature. I'll wait for the haxx0red version from Russia.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
If we can figure out fast visual pattern matching, we might be able to take an entire
image and determine the stick figures and labels representation for it by matching up stored
image fragments to things present in the original. Then we build a system that does
it repeatedly, add a "consciousness" module that works by noting changes between
previous labels and current labels, and then add voice output to it so that it can say
"Hello Dave" when Dave walks into the room. That should freak some people out.
Pics or it didn't happen.
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
I tried to draw a picture of a man with an erection. I labeled him "porn guy". Then I drew a picture of a woman with her mouth open and labeled her "porn whore cumshot".
If optimized for porn, people will have a field day with this.
BTW, Why "porn guy" vs "Porn whore" instead of, say, "port chick" ?
This is part of the problem with porn....
No. Mashups are clearly derived works, which fall under copyright quite clearly. Since this is in China, I'm pretty they're ignoring an IP laws and will probably get away with it. In the U.S., however, every one of those images better be licensed for royalty-free distribution, or they'd be sued.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
BOTNET
Yours in Petrograd,
Kilgore T.
Wow. I'm instantly instilled with the urge to plug an XKCD comic into this and see what happens.
Is that craptastic nonsense the contorted rationalization you had to come up with to justify your fantasies involving Asian boys?
Infuriate left and right
I suppose it won't work if you try sketching the Dalai Lama?
I've heard of academic projects on filtering out porn (Australian military didn't want people surfing smut on the clock). I'd imagine that filtering out pics of the Dalai Lama would be harder...
Compositions of copyrighted and uncleared images; just what we need. I assume those students who created it were law students?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Ive spent months on 4chan trying to find hillarious pictures of zombie-dino-anonymous-jesus-hitler goatse that just DO NOT EXIST. With the latest technology from the interweb i can save several hours of stolen photoshop work and just sketch with the only hand i have above the desk the exact image of my pope-toilet-donkey-satan-pedobear-moneyshot-mobile. sauce, included.
Good people go to bed earlier.
why am i reminded of stalin getting people airbrushed out of photos?
and how long until someone uses it to put obama sharing a meal with osama bin-laden?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Someone should take all the XKCD comics, mark 'em up a bit, turn 'em into nice pictures, and .... Profit!!
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
That is because they are with me... wait, who are they?
You know your old when you don't regonize any of the names of today's hotties. And think they should cover up their bellies, do they want to catch a cold?
Good job slashdot btw, on holding out the sex comment so long.
Me, I thought of the porn possibilites when I read the first line.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It was on digg a couple of days ago and it wasn't working then. All the news stories say it's taking the world by storm but I've yet to hear of anyone whose actually used it. Don't they have mirrors in China?
Downloaded the binaries, extracted the executables to my WinXP VM instance, and got the error, "The system cannot execute the specified program". Got .NET installed, so it must be looking for some C++ dependencies. Not pretty...
The fact that a Chinese university is doing cutting-edge research is a good thing for you Americans. That means they're getting richer, thus a growing market for the pop culture products and Hollywood entertainment you're so good at exporting. Maybe 80% of the entertainment in the telly here in Denmark (in Europe) is from the US.
Now you just need to teach them to abide your copyrights. Maybe they can teach you how to eat vegetables in return. Fix an obesity problem or two, eh?
...to faking video footage a la The Running Man.
Isn't this the visual equivalent of a mashup?
Aren't mashups already in a copyright gray area?
In the US we have this really fucked up way of dealing with derivative works - the more complicated the work, the less of it needs to be incorporated into another work before it is considered an infringement. Yes, that's right the more information in the original the smaller the percentage of that information is required to disqualify any fair use defense.
So you can quote a couple of lines of a short poem in a book or even have a character speak them in a movie and that's generally OK. But sample just 3 notes of another song and you are in deep doodoo. Similarly, any background artwork in a movie - simply just pictures hanging on the wall in the background of a scene and thus mostly out of focus and of very low effective resolution require clearance and licensing fees, frequently absurdly high fees and of course just about any clip of video used in another movie or show - even on a television in the background of a scene - is going to require licensing too.
Most hollywood studies have an entire division devoted just handling these clearances (look in the credits for most movies and you'll see at least one person credited as head of the clearances group). This practice has the effect of keeping the "little guys" out of the motion picture business similar to the way patent pools are used to squash tech start-ups - all the studios have large "pools" of our culture under their copyright and the independent artist can't afford to license any of it for his work while the other studios can make each other sweetheart deals that guarantee cheap and easy access to each studio's "pool" of culture.
So no, mash-ups, since they generally are 100% composed of samples of other songs, aren't anywhere near being gray in the USA.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yeah. That could work.
--Face recognition software ought to be able to replace actors heads with yours in all the appropriate places, and get the lighting correct, etc. As well as being able to re-map whole environments according to taste.
With formula writing being what it is, you could probably even set up algorithms capable of recognizing romantic scenes versus actions sequences. Humans are quite predictable as to what they respond to. It sounds like you could just punch in, "Romantic comedy, straight couple, includes car chase, musical number, and a bitter-sweet ending."
How interesting. Artificial Intelligence might display its initial strengths through pop-art, the one place where we thought we were truly unique and strong.
-FL
The word you're looking for is "collage".
Dolly Madison died in 1849, so it's more likely that you're too young.
The current version only works with photos downloaded to specific keyword folders. They need to provide an API or source code or something. I don't want to download. It should just go through google image and flickr tag searches and store in the proper folders automatically. There's a lot of good stuff that can be happening here. Imagine inserting web comics as input!
Shopped.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
There is already a Google Sketchup Plugin for $50 or $350 depending on the license.
http://www.brainstormllc.com/
Imagine the millions of crows shrieking: Copyright violation!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Aren't mashups already in a gray area?
The problem is that you're letting your potatoes get exposed to air for too long before mashing them. Submerge them in iced water prior to mashing, and add some sour cream to the mash, then your mashup will have a creamy texture and clean white color.
... and then they built the supercollider.
And its evil too!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
A nifty image mashup application may be interesting research, and it may even be worth funding, but that doesn't make it basic research. The label "basic research" comes because it's exploring areas which are fundamental to a wider field of science.
All they've done is captured the algorithm used to create the comic strip, and run it backwards.
... a random slashdot link.
Fixed that for you.
"But everyone should know everything." -markab
I can't wait for someone to tie this in with Broken Picture Telephone.
I'm glad Bush's old government didn't have this back in the day. They could've fabricated much more convincing evidence of "Mobile chemical weapons laboratories" for the UN than the hot-dog vendor van they showed. They might have actually got a war started against Iraq. Oh.. wait....
FWIW I saw something very close to this created by IIRC NEC around 1992.
I believe it was running on an EWS style workstation. Basically you would make a hand drawing like they show, and color the objects in the scene, i.e. blue square at bottom for a sea view, etc. The purpose was to do very high speed image searching to find images matching your drawing. The speed reported was IIRC 90,000 images per second. Basically you had a low resolution drawing and it was comparing thumbnails. Not as advanced as what is being discussed, but same idea and maybe faster even on 15 year old hardware.I saw this demo when working for Pacific Press Service in Tokyo.
...is bigger than its pelvis?
It's a gray area in the sense that it's illegal for the likes of you and I, but okay if you're Lily Allen...
Given that it's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada, I would have modded that informative if I had points. Though I have to admit that /. is the last place I expected to get cooking advice...
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Kate Beckinsale:
Van Helsing: vampire hunter Anna Valerius
Underworld series: vampire Selene
Whiteout: Deputy Marshal Carrie Stetko (most recent, though I haven't seen it.)
Jessica Biel:
Dolly Madison:
Bakery, makes snack cakes and such. Named after first Lady Dolley Madison. Judging from the trend so far, either these are Angel's and/or Spike's favorite non-blood snack, or else Dolley Madison herself was an under-cover vampire hunter.