PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.
I have been reading about photosketch on Phil Bradley's blog and you can read about it in the Telegraph online This is supposedly computer software that allows you to make a sketch: the program searches the internet and returns a composite photo from your sketch.
Many people on the Internet think this is a scam. If I have to guess I'll say I think it's a scam too. Whilst it is I guess theoretically possible that you could write a program that would incorporate algorithms reflecting all the decisions of taste and judgement that a human performs in selecting and comparing images, as far as I know we are a million light years from that point at the moment. There is no current software that I know of that can look at a picture and isolate the foreground from the background to cut out a particular shape. If there was it would make many mistakes. Matching one image with an appropriately scaled background is another almost impossible task. The examples given in the photo are fantasticaly clear and appropriate so even if the process is theoretically possible I do not believe it could routinely give results as good as this.
That said I would be delighted to be proved wrong!
Actually they mention Alpha selection and I guess that does fulfil my first requirement...
Actually I know absolutely nothing about any of this at all, I confess, so I stand agape.
Comments