“Teaching Google Photoshop.” That’s the three-word mission statement I chose upon joining Photos. I meant it as shorthand for “getting computers to see & think like artists.” Now researchers are enabling that kind of human-savvy adjustment to run in realtime, even on handheld devices:
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Google are presenting a new system that can automatically retouch images in the style of a professional photographer. It’s so energy-efficient, however, that it can run on a cellphone, and it’s so fast that it can display retouched images in real-time, so that the photographer can see the final version of the image while still framing the shot.
And yes, it’s a small world: “The researchers trained their system on a data set created by Durand’s group and Adobe Systems;” and Jiawen interned at Adobe; and then-Adobe researcher Aseem Agarwala collaborated with Frédo before joining Google.
[YouTube]