Here’s some very cool imaging tech, though it’ll be interesting to see how many people will take the time to create multiple exposures, each with different controlled lighting:

If this is up your alley, check out a paper and video on the subject that some Adobe researchers put together a couple of years back.

Oh my; how long until we see the Ralph Lauren EmaciatorPro(™) Edition?

Here’s more info on the project. (And no, unlike Puppet Warp, it’s not a CS5 thing.) [Via Jerry Harris]

Heh–here’s a nice little satire of phony image enhancement on TV (see previous montage):

Of course, image scientists continue to work on all sorts of new craziness, so it’s all just a matter of time… right?

People always like to joke about Photoshop eventually adding a big red “Make My Photo Good” button, automatically figuring out what looks good & what adjustments are needed. Of course, researchers are working on just that sort of thing:

As someone who aspires to be creative, I have mixed feelings. The idea of rating images according to precomputed standards of beauty makes me think of the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets Society excoriating a textbook that rated poetry along two axes:

Excrement! That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We’re not laying pipe! We’re talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? “I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!”

And yet, I find I’m intrigued by the idea, wanting to run the algorithm on my images–if only, maybe, to have fun flouting it. I also have to admit that I’d like to see the images taken by certain of my family members (not you, hon) run through such algorithms–if only to crop in on the good stuff.
[Via Jerry Harris]

• A technology called Photosounder can treat images as audio (demo). “Sounds, once turned into images,” they say, “can be powerfully modified to achieve effects and results that couldn’t be obtained in any other way, while images of all sorts reveal the infinite kinds of otherworldly sounds they contain.” [Via]
• In a related vein, scientists have turned dolphin calls into kaleidoscopic patterns. (Note the image gallery navigation controls on the right.) [Via]

You like? 🙂 (Here’s some more background on the technology.) To see higher-res detail, I recommend hitting the full-screen icon or visiting the Facebook page that hosts the video.
As with all such sneak peeks, I have to be really clear in saying that this is just a demo, and as such it’s not a promise that a technology will ship inside a particular version of Photoshop. (As the late Mac columnist Don Crabb told me years ago, “There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup & lip.”) Still, it’s fun to show some of the stuff with which we’re experimenting.

Oh, that’s rather cool, then:

I’ve seen various experiments at Adobe that fetch & automatically composite images, but the idea of basing searches on sketches is new to me. Details are in the researchers’ paper (PDF).
Almost completely unrelated, but in the spirit of cool image science, during last night’s sneak peeks at Adobe MAX, Dan Goldman showed a little taste of “PatchMatch” (“content-aware healing”) integrated into Photoshop. (As always, no promises, this is just a test, yadda yadda.)

Adobe researcher Aseem Agarwala, working with Maneesh Agrawala & Robert Carroll at Berkeley, has demonstrated techniques to enable “Content-Preserving Projections for Wide-Angle Images.” That may sound a little dry, but check out the demo video (10MB QT) to see how the work enables extremely wide-angle photography. [Via Dan Goldman]
Aseem contributed the depth-of-field extension feature to Photoshop CS4. For previous entries showing advanced imaging work, check out this blog’s Image Science category.

Adobe researchers Hailin Jin and Aseem Agarwala*, collaborating with U.Wisconsin prof. Michael Gleicher & Feng Liu, have unveiled their work on “Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization.” In other words, their tech can give your (and my) crappy hand-held footage the look of a Steadicam shot.

Check out the demonstration video, shot at & around Adobe’s Seattle office. (Hello, Fremont Lenin!) It compares the new technique to what’s available in iMovie ’09 and other commercial tools.

As with all research papers/demos, I should point out making technology ready for real-world use can require plenty of additional work & tuning. Still, these developments are encouraging. [Via]

[Previously: Healing Brush & Content-Aware Scaling on (really good) drugs.]

* If you’ve created a panorama using Photoshop, you’ve used Hailin’s (image alignment) and Aseem’s (image blending) work.

“This is your Healing Brush.
“This is your Content-Aware Scaling.

“*This* is your Healing Brush & Content-Aware Scaling on (really good) drugs…”

Adobe researchers Eli Shechtman & Dan Goldman, working together with Prof. Adam Finkelstein from Princeton & PhD student Connelly Barnes, have introduced PatchMatch, “A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing.”

No, I wouldn’t know a randomized correspondence algorithm for structural image editing if it bit me on the butt, either, but just check out the very cool video demo. More details are in the paper (one of the 17 papers featuring Adobe collaboration presented at SIGGRAPH this year).

So, what do you think? [Via]

I was excited to hear that researchers at Adobe have submitted 22% of all papers accepted at SIGGRAPH this year. That’s a pretty incredible accomplishment*. In addition, Wojciech Matusik has been selected as this year’s recipient of the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Research Award. Congrats, guys!
The company has been making significant investments & attracting top talent in this area in recent years, and it’s great to see those efforts bearing fruit. It’ll be even better when we start harvesting more of this research as real-world features in Photoshop and other apps–and believe me, we’re working to do just that.
* By way of comparison, Microsoft had 6 papers accepted this year (vs. Adobe’s 17). Microsoft has 90,000 employees; Adobe has 7,000.

Remember Shai Avidan, the co-creator of seam carving (Content-Aware Scaling) who joined Adobe last year?  Just as he did at Adobe MAX last year, Shai took to the stage this year with an eye-catching demo.  Collaborating with Prof. Bill Freeman and a team from MIT, Shai has been working on "Infinite Images," "a system for exploring large collections of photos in a virtual 3D space."  The team writes:

Our system does not assume the photographs are of a single real 3D location, nor that they were taken at the same time. Instead, we organize the photos in themes, such as city streets or skylines, and let users navigate within each theme using intuitive 3D controls that include pan, zoom and rotate…

We present results on a collection of several millions of images downloaded from Flickr and broken into themes that consist of a few hundred thousands images each. A byproduct of our system is the ability to construct extremely long panoramas, as well as image taxi, a program that generates a virtual tour between a user supplied start and finish images.

To read up on some details, check out the PDF (shared via Acrobat.com):

You could also visit Shai’s site to read up on “Non-Parametric Acceleration, Super-Resolution, and Off-Center Matting,” not to mention “Part Selection with Sparse Eigenvectors”–but I’d recommend being a lot smarter than I am. 😉 (We just may have to name our next child “Eigenvector.”)

"Dan Goldman is an old friend of mine from ILM," writes FX pro Stu Maschwitz.  "He now works for Adobe’s top-secret G*d Dammit Put This In A Product Now division."  Check out Dan’s Interactive Video Object Manipulation demo to see if you agree.  (Now that Photoshop Extended can work with video, it’s fun to imagine the possibilities.  No promises, of course.)

Pravin Bhat & friends at the University of Washington have put together a rather eye-popping video that demonstrates Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene.  I think you’ll dig it.  (The removal of the No Parking sign is especially impressive.) [Via Jeff Tranberry]

The work builds upon research by Adobe’s Aseem Agarwala (who was instrumental in bringing Auto-Blend to Photoshop CS3).  Adobe Senior Principal Scientist (and UW prof.) David Salesin is helping facilitate more collaboration between Adobe teams & academia, recruiting full-time hires like Aseem & sponsoring visiting researchers like Hany Farid.

(Note: As always, please don’t take my mentioning of various tech demos as a hint about any specific feature showing up in a particular Adobe product. I just post things that I find interesting & inspiring.)

Previously:

• Cool painting tech demo o’ the day
• Imaging heavy hitters join Adobe.

Photoshop engineer Jerry Harris is responsible for the application’s painting tools, and he’s always got an eye open for interesting developments in the field of computerized painting.  This morning he passed along a cool demo video of James McCann and Nancy Pollard’s Real-time Gradient-domain Painting technology.

In a nutshell, according to the video, "A gradient brush allows me to paint with intensity differences.  When I draw a stroke, I am specifying that one side is lighter than the other."  Uh, okay… And the video is a little ho-hum until the middle.  That’s when things get rather cool.  Check out cloning/duplicating pixels along a path, plus the interesting approach to painting a band of color.

A number of rock stars from the world of image science have recently joined Adobe:

• That crazy-cool image resizing demo I mentioned last week continues to get all kinds of attention.  I was therefore happy to learn that co-creator Shai Avidan joined the Adobe office in Newton, MA (just down the ‘pike from MIT) last Monday.  Here’s a bit more info and Shai’s photo.
• Wojciech Matusik began work at Adobe in May.  He’s done some really cool work in the emerging fields of multi-aperture photography, 3D TV, and much more.  Like Shai, he works from the Newton office.
• Sylvain Paris is due to join Adobe in a couple of weeks.  He’s worked on techniques for matching tones across photos ("Make my image pop like Ansel’s"), generating 3D data from 2D captures, and more. His paper on bilateral filtering was written with MIT colleagues Jiawen Chen (who interned this summer at Adobe) and Fredo Durand.

Adobe Senior Principal Scientist David Salesin, who manages this crew, notes that "If you count their SIGGRAPH papers as well, you’ll see that current Adobe employees had 11 of the 108 papers in the conference."

Now, let me inject a disclaimer:  Just because a particular researcher has worked on a particular technology in his or her past life, it’s not possible to conclude that a specific feature will show up in a particular Adobe product.  How’s that for non-commital? ;-)  In any case, it’s just exciting that so many smart folks are joining the team (more brains to hijack!).

[Update: Cambridge, MA-based Xconomy provides additional context for this news.]

Wow–now this I haven’t seen before: Israeli brainiacs Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir have created a pretty darn interesting video that demonstrates their technique of "Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing."  When scaling an image horizontally or vertically (e.g. making a panorama narrower), the technology looks for paths of pixels that can be removed while causing the least visual disruption.  Just as interesting, if not more so, I think, is the way the technology can add pixels when increasing image dimensions.  Seriously, just check out the video; I think you’ll be blown away.  (More info is in a 20MB PDF, in which they cite work by Adobe’s Aseem Agarwala–the creator of Photoshop CS3’s Auto-Blend Layer code.) [Via Geoff Stearns]

I hope to share more good stuff from SIGGRAPH soon.  While I was being stuffed with ham sandwiches by kindly Irish folks, a number of Adobe engineers were speaking at & exploring the show.  Todor Georgiev, one of the key minds behind the Healing Brush, has been busily gluing together his own cutting edge optical systems.  More on that soon.