Software turns photos from bad to good

< Prev | 1 | 2

MSN Tech and Gadgets

8 cool phones you can't get here (yet)

With unlimited time to scrutinize the photos, a group of study participants thought 37 percent of Hays and Efros’ doctored images were genuine, but were fooled by only one in 10 photos altered by a program that uses bits of the same picture as a patch. Untouched photos, by contrast, were labeled as the real deal 87 percent of the time.

Antonio Torralba, an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, called the new research a “very exciting” demonstration of what can be accomplished with such large datasets.

He should know. For his own research, Torralba has amassed a collection of 80 million low-resolution images, each just 32 by 32 pixels. Even at that low resolution, he said, a computer program can pick out enough general details like orientation and texture to reliably retrieve most images that contain, say, a dog.

Story continues below ↓

advertisement | your ad here

For their photo-patch, Hays and Efros incorporated Torralba’s “gist descriptor” code into a larger program that sifted through the Flickr database. Sometimes, the search results suggested that a mountain stream could take the place of a similarly oriented street running toward a historic building. And occasionally, the patch even yielded a geographically precise replacement (like how a basilica would really look without its scaffolding). Ultimately, though, Hays and Efros said the photo’s final appearance would be up to each individual user.

Such blemish-obscuring tools may seem like the equivalent of testosterone shots among Tour de France cyclists. But, as Torralba noted, tinkering with celebrity photos to add scandalous liaisons or subtract unsightly blemishes is nothing new.

“Faking pictures is something that has probably happened since the beginning of photography,” he said. “Of course, this probably provides you with a tool to make it easier.”

Even with 2.3 million images to call upon, however, the process is far from perfect. If erasing a persona non grata also removes the leg of a bystander, for example, similar scenes are unlikely to offer a realistic reconstruction of the missing limb. Far more nettlesome may be the new uncertainties the technology poses for copyright protection laws. Does borrowing a piece of one image to patch another, for example, fall within the fair-use exemption under an image’s copyright protection?

If the outstanding technical and legal issues can be resolved, Hays and Efros ultimately envision a Web-based service in which consumers would be able to submit an incomplete photo and get back a range of possible patches.

In principle, Torralba said, such a program has a promising commercial future. And for someone determined to digitally scrub all traces of a former beau from the canals of Venice, the technology could well be priceless.

< Prev | 1 | 2