Techno Babble

Developed by Cooliris Inc, PicLens combines a “Cover Flow” style with a 3D Image wall to present a novel way for viewing photos and videos across the web via your web-browser.

Plugins are available for Internet Explorer and Firefox and PicLens works with a number of websites. A search feature is built-in to the viewer which allows you to easily search and browse for images on sites such as Flickr and Google Web Albums.

PicLens is a free download, free to use, quick and easy to install and contains no spyware, adware or malware.

http://www.piclens.com

Additional tools are provided that allow users to enable their own websites for Piclens and there is also a Wordpress plugin available - so watch this space, I’ll be experimenting with these tools on this blog in the near future.

Update 1: this blog is now enabled for PicLens

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rsizr is a flash-based web application that allows you to resize images.

http://rsizr.com/

It is a free on-line service that uses seam carving to allow you to change the size of an image without distorting areas of interest.

Simply upload an image file (JPG, PNG or GIF) which must be less than 2880 pixels in width or height.

and you’re good to go…

When you’re finished you can save a copy of your edited image on your computer.

Full documentation is available at

http://help.rsizr.com/index.html

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A paper was presented at the recent Siggraph 2007 which describes a technique that allows the resizing of images while retaining important features without distortion.

ABSTRACT

Effective resizing of images should not only use geometric constraints, but consider the image content as well. We present a simple image operator called seam carving that supports content-aware image resizing for both reduction and expansion. A seam is an optimal 8-connected path of pixels on a single image from top to bottom, or left to right, where optimality is defined by an image energy function. By repeatedly carving out or inserting seams in one direction we can change the aspect ratio of an image. By applying these operators in both directions we can retarget the image to a new size. The selection and order of seams protect the content of the image, as defined by the energy function. Seam carving can also be used for image content enhancement and object removal. We support various visual saliency measures for defining the energy of an image, and can also include user input to guide the process. By storing the order of seams in an image we create multi-size images, that are able to continuously change in real time to fit a given size.

Authors: Shai Avidan (MERL) and Ariel Shamir (The Interdisciplinary Center and MERL)

You can read a full copy of the paper at the ACM Digital Library

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1276377.1276390

and watch a video of the technique in action

Details of Ariel Shamirs other research interests are available from his website at

http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/

and Shai Avidan at

http://www.merl.com/people/avidan/avidan.html

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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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A technique for capturing and viewing “Gigapixel images” was described at the recent Siggraph 2007 Conference and exhibition. Gigapixel images are very high resolution, high dynamic range, and wide angle imagery consisting of several billion pixels each

Here are 3 views from a gigapixel image:

Read more details at

http://www.johanneskopf.de/publications/gigapixel/index.html

watch a video

or read the paper

http://www.kf12.com/blogs/uploads/finalpaper_0371.pdf (19Mb)

In order to view Gigapixel images you need HD View.

HD View is a new viewer developed by Microsoft Research’s Interactive Visual Media group to aid in the display and interaction with very large images.

HD View was developed with a number of goals in mind. It should:

• allow smooth panning and zooming on large images,
• only download enough data to create the current view (and possibly look ahead to the next),
• always display the current field of view with an appropriate projection. This means that when zoomed way in you should be presented with a standard perspective projection providing a sense of immersion, and when zoomed out you experience a curved projection so that get a full overview of the scene. In between the projection should smoothly transition.
• Finally, it should be easy to create your own HD View content and present it to the world via the web.

http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView.htm

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A recent BBC News article discusses a recent development by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University that enables unwanted portions of photographs to be replaced.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6936444.stm

The technique matches segments from the millions of images available on the web, with the photo being edited, to fill holes or add objects providing seamless results.

The process was recently described in papers presented at the recent Siggraph in San Diego

Photo Clip Art - An interactive system for inserting new objects into existing photographs using a vast image-based object library.

and

Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs - A method for filling holes in images using semantically and structurally similar scenes from a large internet photo library.

Other links to this story include:

http://www.physorg.com/news103287076.html

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-07/cmu-cmr071007.php