Techno Babble

Talking about Gigapixel Images, it looks like there is a new feature in Google Earth that incorporates photos into the Earth Environment.

You can try it for yourself by switching on the “Gigapxl Photos” layer beneath the “Featured Content” layer. This will show placemarks for the available locations with gigapixel images.

There’s a sample video showing the feature in action

and an accompanying article on the Google Earth Blog here

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/08/new_photo_viewer_wit.html

Here’s a sample - the Angels Window , Grand Canyon at the starting point

and zoomed in …

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I attended the presentation of a series of papers related to Image Manipulation. Aimed primarily at tools for the digital darkroom, the papers were nonetheless interesting.

Color Harmonisation

Input Image

harmonized background (buildings)

Colour Harmonisation, is related to ensuring harmonization of the colours used in images using a series of Hue Harmonic Templates (for the colour hsv colour wheel). Ensuring that all the colours used in the image lie within a segment of the color hue wheel will ensure colour harmonization. (Harmonic colors are sets of colors that are aesthetically pleasing in terms of human visual perception).

Details of the paper are available at

http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~sorkine/ProjectPages/Harmonization/.

Drag and drop pasting

Click the image to see the dragged region and then the pasted result
unfortunately this will only work in IE (not Firefox) )

Drag and drop pasting - of one image within another (seamless image composition). It was not possible to tell that the image pasted was not part of the original image. Some more detail is available at

http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/…/drag-and-drop_pasting.html

Two-scale Tone Management for Photographic Look

Two-scale Tone Management for Photographics Look - employed a technique to merge the appearance (tone) from one image with another.

Abstract
We introduce a new approach to tone management for photographs. Whereas traditional tone-mapping operators target a neutral and faithful rendition of the input image, we explore pictorial looks by controlling visual qualities such as the tonal balance and the amount of detail. Our method is based on a two-scale non-linear decomposition of an image. We modify the different layers based on their histograms and introduce a technique that controls the spatial variation of detail. We introduce a Poisson correction that prevents potential gradient reversal and preserves detail. In addition to directly controlling the parameters, the user can transfer the look of a model photograph to the picture being edited.

Read more at

http://people.csail.mit.edu/soonmin/photolook/

Interactive adjustment of tonal values

Interactive adjustment of tonal values - showed the possibility of adjusting the tone in selected parts of the image interactively. Here’s a paper on the subject

http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~danix/itm/

Image-based material editing

Image-based material editing - was a presentation of the techniques described in an earlier article in this blog, where the material of objects in images can be replaced by other materials.

http://www.kf12.com/blogs/techno/?p=310

Summary

In summary - All the above techniques are interesting in that they are done in “real-time” as post-processing operations. Although they are applied primarily for photographic images, there is no reason, as far as I can determine, why they could not be equally applied to rendered images as post-processing operations.

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