[A step beyond photo editing that further blurs the distinction between recorded and created reality, PhotoSketch was created by students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore in China and will be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 in December – see the 3:41 video at Vimeo (“a respectful community of creative people who are passionate about sharing the videos they make”)]

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage

by tao chen

Wed, Sep 9, 2009

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.