Pull Images from the Web & Combine Them Automatically

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.

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