Photosketch Internet Image Montage: This Needs to be Out Now
October 9th, 2009
Developed by a team of students from Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore, Photosketch is a more practical version of Scribblenauts. Say you want to have a picture of a shark jumping out of the sea in an attempt to swallow a helicopter. All you have to do create a rough sketch the helicopter and the shark, like would in MS Paint. Then you label both figures, and add an additional label for the background, i.e. the sea. Photosketch will then trawl the internet for images that fit your sketch and stitch them together.
The image above is an actual result from Photosketch. This shit is magical. The crucial thing about Photosketch of course is the algorithm that selects the images that best fit a given sketch. Instead of pretending to understand these things, I’ll just let Tao Chen, one of the students behind the program, explain it to you:
Photosketch is so awesome that the webpage it was on had to be taken down, most likely due to the massive hits that it got. Although personally I think that the program can still be improved – for example, it seems that you can’t look for a specific entity, say “Cheney” to go along with “rifle” and “face” – this is definitely truly really mind blowing technology. Nerd Powah!
[via The Presurfer]
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Categories: Computing Digital Imaging Future Tech Just Plain Fun Strange + Wonderful Technology
Tags: awesome internet photography photosketch pictures program search engine Software
Amazing it’d be fun to play with but I don’t see any real application other than holy crap look what this can do.
I’ll have to keep my eye on this though.
no real application?
as an artist that does photomanipulation and drawings of photos/people, i find GREAT use to for this. i can use this for reference photo location!
Is this a hoax? Did it get slapped down because of copyright infringements regarding the name “photosketch” (see Brainstorm technologies) or the online photos which are used without citations?
This was reported on our local news channel, but I can’t confirm the program’s actual existence. On other websites, people are saying that it isn’t really possible.