A group of students from the National University of Singapore recently demonstrated Photosketch, a technology they describe as “Internet image montage.”
In their abstract, they say, “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.”
In other words, you start with this:
And PhotoSketch goes to the Web, finds images, smooshes them together, and gives you this:
I know, I have a hard time believing it too. But there’s even a video of the process:
PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.
I’m not sure if it’s possible to try PhotoSketch yourself — heavy interest has brought down their Web site.
To tell you the truth, I hope it stays down. If PhotoSketch works as well as the video implies, it won’t be long before images are pulled from all over the Internet. And as a content creator, I’m skeptical of something that could make copyright violation even simpler than it already is.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on October 7, 2009
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