Just saw this on /.
It's based on a database of million+ images.



http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/scene-completion/

Quote :

"What can you do with a million images? In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user. Unlike existing image completion methods, our algorithm can generate a diverse set of image completions and we allow users to select among them. We demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over existing image completion approaches."

I might just think this is cool because I worked doing image doctoring for a while. This really amazed me how well it is done.

[Edited on August 9, 2007 at 10:51 AM. Reason : quote]

8/9/2007 10:49:20 AM

interesting, i like it. only thing i didnt like was the color tampering that i think had to occur in order for the scenes to mesh smoothly (could be my monitors at work tho for sure, they arent the best)




[Edited on August 9, 2007 at 11:04 AM. Reason : ]

8/9/2007 10:58:59 AM

photosynth

8/9/2007 11:00:51 AM

^not even close to the same thing

8/9/2007 11:10:11 AM

Add this to photosynth and you could generate 3D images of just about anything all on-the-fly. Then use photosynth's feature recognition function and tag metadata to features you can tie into a wikipedia like database and you have a really rediculious tool. It would make finding Sara Connor easy.

8/9/2007 11:23:14 AM

somebody patch m2c

8/9/2007 12:39:15 PM

very cool.

8/10/2007 6:47:02 AM

whats more impressive is their website

why is it so hard for everyone else to make one that doesnt look like shit

8/10/2007 7:24:58 AM

^yea, its refreshing to see a site that is nice and functional.

Probably because most people have really bad taste, and giving those people creative tools usually results in disaster.

8/10/2007 12:55:10 PM

can't do much about bad taste.

8/13/2007 11:35:47 AM