PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage

Designed by a team at the National University of Singapore, PhotoSketch is the latest and greatest in image creation systems. The full description of how it works can be found here, but the basic process is this:

Draw a basic object, name it and repeat this for any other objects you want in your picture, then name the background. PhotoSketch then searches the Internet for images that match the descriptions given, and after a bit of sorting out, you have all the elements necessary for seamless stitching. The possibilities seem endless. Check out the video!

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. 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. 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; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.

Via: Gizmodo.