Seam carving, cloning, & cutouts

John Nack noted work by Adobe researchers on PatchMatch, A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing and its the cool video demo to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2009. The lingo in the video probably won't be familiar, but you'll know that "hole filling" with "image patches" translates as cloning, and that a jump in image editing capabilities is on the horizon. Or at least enhancements for the Photoshop Healing Brush.

To see more, you can check out SIGGRAPH 2009 papers on the web by Ke-Sen Huang. Below are a few related examples of research presented for SIGGRAPH conferences; some of these were mentioned earlier here at AEP, filed under "graphics" or "" along with interesting experiments by Microsoft and others. Of course seeing prototype demos doesn't mean you'll see shipping features anywhere.


Improved Seam Carving for Video Retargeting was presented at SIGGRAPH 2008. Mentioned earlier this year, it looks at seam carving challenges with video content.




The SIGGRAPH 2009 paper Multi-operator Media Retargeting furthers research in "content aware scaling" with multiple operators for scaling, cropping, and warping.




An inverse of "image patching" might be object tracking, extraction and manipulation, and new approaches are being considered here also. Interactive video cutout is an older interactive system for efficiently extracting foreground objects from a video.



The Video SnapCut demo for SIGGRAPH 2009 shows research more recent results in interactive object cutout/roto for video.



Another demo of experiments with objects in video is Interactive Video Object Manipulation by Dan Goldman.




Finally, also already mentioned but really cool is Enhancing and Experiencing Spacetime Resolution with Videos and Stills. This one is related to another project blogged around last year, Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene:



Update: I left some out when pulling from the impressive list of 90 or more SIGGRAPH 2009 papers on the web by Ke-Sen Huang. CDM posted one paper some fanfare in Magical, 3D-Warping Techniques Steadies Your Videos: