an After Effects Portal: 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 "peek" 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.