How many time have you been out taking photographs and the perfect shot gets ruined by by people walking into frame or there is an unfortunately placed building in garish pink. Well now we can all have the ability to retouch pictures in a manner previously reserved for communist dictators with out the need to be some kind of photoshop guru. Slashdot is reporting a research paper released from Carnegie Mellon demonstrating how to replace arbitrarily shaped blank areas in an image with portions of images from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner.
There is a paper (pdf) on their page that shows some good examples of the process, but it will remain to see if it can be deployed successfully. There is an excellent tool for stitching images, autostitch, that stitches image using spherical perspective rather than 2D stitching. I have used it to put together many panoramic images, but there are times when it can’t put two pictures that were taken side by side together. The scope planned by the Carnegie Mellon guys seems to be orders of magnitude bigger. At the very least the bigger there database if images getting the longer it will trawl to find the correct match.
However I can’t wait for it to come out that are some dissidents spoiling old birthday photographs of mine…