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Rendering Synthetic Objects Into Old Photographs
First time accepted submitter IDarkISwordI writes "A new abstract headed to SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 provides a method for rapid execution of computer graphics, synthesized into photographs with accurate lighting and physics based on limited input from a user and interpretation by their code." The results are impressive; hard to watch the video demo (on linked page) without boggling.
This is going to be very useful for real estate sales. No need to move furniture into an empty house for the pictures.
Especially getting the lighting and the shadows to fit the rest of the image.
I love it when slashdot news do that to me
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any software available for download, only the research paper. (If it's there, and I missed it, please let me know.) Hopefully someone will make a plugin for this, so we can use it in GIMP, PS, etc..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
... the next time someone wants to frame someone else for murder ;P
Why, yes! I AM new here.
Take picture of buddy's place. Insert stolen sculpture. Send to police.
Well, that pretty well wraps it up for anyone trying to prove anything supernatural or extra-terrestrial on earth. Who would ever believe any video evidence now?
Right at the end of the video. Now you can have a weeping angel moving through your very own lounge!
Obligatory XKCD
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
If the manual touch-up bits could be automated, this is just about everything augmented reality is supposed to be.
404: sig not found.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any software available for download, only the research paper.
The release is delayed because the software is limited to only a few useful objects at the moment: Buddha Statue, Dragon Statue, Pool Table and Dead Hooker.
Often software releases for submission to SIGGRAPH, don't appear until the following year. The number of individuals working on the software is quite limited and it may be too buggy still for release. Another possibility, and very unfortunate if so, is if they intend to market this to an interested buyer, which would likely be MANY.
those dragons don't look peculiar at all, they look like they belonged in the original photo!
This photo http://www.mitre.org/about/photo_archives/photos/low_res/whirlwind_f5001.jpg is begging for a larger than life teapot.
Finally! Now we know how Dude Perfect makes all those shots!
Or more appropriately... http://xk3d.xkcd.com/331/
http://s418.photobucket.com/albums/pp263/Ironic-Mike/?action=view¤t=X-WingonAircraftCarrier.jpg
This line is padding.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any software available for download, only the research paper.
The release is delayed because the software is limited to only a few useful objects at the moment: Buddha Statue, Dragon Statue, Pool Table and Dead Hooker.
But I need software that can *remove* dead hookers from photos! That's the problem with academia, totally disconnected with the needs of the real world.
The shadows may look "better" but the shade and reflected light on the placed subject still needs work. The palette of the placed object also seems to lack white balancing to the picture.
As long as someone tells you there's fake in the picture, you can still tell what the fake bit is, without using a computer to spot anomalies. It's cool to see that tools get this powerful, but it's not good enough to fake any sharp observer yet, let alone a decent forensic study with computer aid.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The communists under Stalin were "fixing" photographs to remove undesirable people for a long time, many years before electronic computers and graphics were invented. Of course, the undesirable people were removed from real life as well...
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Modern-day Yezhovs already tremble in fear. With this technology, Syria, China (or soon the US) will be able to disappear people by millions! :p
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
...will have a field day with this. Please, someone keep him away from whatever _is_ left of the original Star Wars film!
Didn't someone once suggest that we refer to these techniques as lucassizing?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Just how long will it take for the goatse man to make an appearance at the Battle of Antietam, or for a lemon party to be taking place in the background of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.....
Combine the software and techniques in this article, with the software and techniques in this video, and you've got some endlessly useful software.
Where can I download the software? Is it open source? I am afraid it won't be made available, and if it does it will be in a form where you need a few days to get it running. It seems that these kind of solutions developed in the academic world are often sold to commercial companies or made into commercial products.
No, no, no. No need for that.
Just add the dead hooker to a lot of photos, see, that's not a real dead hooker in my photo's, it's added with a computer, see, here is the president with the same dead hooker! Instead of trying to hide the proof, invalidate the proof.
I've only skimmed the PDF (it's way above my level anyway) but I didn't see any notes about license or copyright. It looks pretty detailed... perhaps enough to allow an open-source project to replicate the software. That would be cool.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Equal opportunity. Just sell licenses instead of selling the whole package to a single buyer.
So, peak oil arrives, there is a superflu pandemic, 99942 Apophis impacts and blocks out the Sun, etc. etc. we all die.
...then, centuries later, technological civilisation reemerges, and starts analysing data storage devices they dig up. Most of them are unreadable, but they do get fragments of data with which they can start to piece together what happened before The Event.
And what do they find? Pictures of people listening to iPods at the Battle of Stalingrad and Asimo raising the flag at Iwo Jima.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Once we've also got the ability to render realistic 3D models of real people we're going to be in big trouble.
That's fine so long as you have the mesh and textures for the dead hooker... I guess you could always add a different dead hooker though to a bunch of photos. The president, the judge, the prosecutor, etc.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
simple sign error with the Apollo 11 landing... ...but they got the shadows right for the rest of the 6 total moon landings.
Yes, I know, it was a reflection from all the "tinfoil" on the landing module.
Yes, I know, it's mean to tease the conspiracy theorists - what with them all wearing tinfoil hats and being confused by their odd shadows.
That's one of the many reasons they stay indoors as much as possible.
Adobe was about to raise their fees...
everything? Watch as the White House now releases proof of Osama vs Seals and all sorts of other strange things. I can already see Mohamed hovering over the USS Carl Vinson in approval, down to the fine woolen fibres of the flying carpet. Fiction will now be a fair contestant to reality.
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made. - Otto von Bismarck
Given that this approach is able to account for light sources, geometry (perspective) and physical objects in an original image, it should also be able to remove objects and allow for realistic rendering of that loss. Combine that with the capability described in the proposal and the use of photographs as evidence at trial may soon be inadmissible. Or at the very least, a legal team could reasonably claim that a photo had been doctored (whether true or not) and therefore render such evidence unusable by the prosecution.
Typical /. mentaility "oh science, curse thee for not solving every little problem in my life". Just toss a decorative throw or rug over your dead hooker before taking your family snapshots, problem solved.
Surprised nobody's mentioned how this could affect unscrupulous media outlets and court cases.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I can anticipate a curious pattern emerging. Who knew that some many people would choose to keep the same Dragon Statue or Buddha Statue on top of a blood stained bed in a cheap motel?
Instead of recording just the actors live and having to rely on CG to recreate everything else, with this we could film all physical objects live, and decorate it with CG, like an updated form of rotoscoping. I, for one, would welcome the demise of green-screen films. CG is still unconvincing, no matter how much money they keep spending on it. I still notice it. every. single. time.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
like dragons and Buddha. (Joke. I know its at Siggraph Asia.)
"I've never seen so many dead hookers in all my life!"
"Lord knows I have..."
"Coffee is for closers."
Typical case of Whoosh on Slashdot.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I finally get to remove famous ex-gfs from old photographs! Scarlett- consider yourself forgotten, so PLEASE stop all those desperate phone-calls and emails.
Wait til someone combines random Facebook pics with this plugin.
This is pretty cool but I'm waiting for version two when they extend it to work on video background plates. Shouldn't be that difficult because tracking is a well studied problem.
That capability was added to both Gimp and Photoshop shortly after a similar presentation at SigGraph several years back. Although if my memory serves me correctly, it made it into Gimp first.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't mean to bag on the technique. It really looks phenomenal. But what's going on with that table in the first part of the video (with the glowing orb)? It's partially see through and its reflection doesn't show until the orb is underneath it and it appears faintly.
Please note that "Legacy" does not equal "Old".
The Slashdot title brought up visions of old western scenes strewn with shiny teapots. "Legacy" is used here to indicate an existing photo taken with no intent to use in the manner of the article (no measurements, light probes, etc.).
Perhaps I'm missing something but, for a while now I have been doing this in 3d Studio with HDRI lighting (you would have to make a synthetic HDRI light probe in this case) and render the whole thing in V-Ray. Very realistic.
With some Presidents, it would not even be all that unreasonable to have caught him on film with the same dead hooker as everyone else...
Hello, I have also presented a technique based on the framework of Paul Debevec to render synthetic objects in real scenes. You can look the work at http://www.impa.br/~zang /arlux and http://www.luxrender.net gallery for some examples.
Thanks
Aldo
Resynthesizer, a plug-in for GIMP. The author also has details of the algorithm used published in his thesis paper.