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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."
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.
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.
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?
Wow. I'm instantly instilled with the urge to plug an XKCD comic into this and see what happens.
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.
I'm amazed at how well this seems to automatically extract subjects from their background, something that usually requires a lot of painstaking manual work... honestly that's the real challenge of "photoshopping", becoming a ninja with the selection tools.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson