computational photography

The open-source digital photography software platform, "Frankencamera," will be available as a free download for the Nokia N900. The software platform allows users to create novel camera capabilities and applications. The project is led by Dr. Marc Levoy (Stanford) together with Dr. Kari Pulli, a Nokia Fellow at the Nokia Research Center (NRC) Palo Alto. More information is available in a press release.

Related Article:
Stanford researchers build open-source camera.

Submitted by Boaz Super

In his Ph.D. research at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), Neel Joshi developed methods for enhancing a photo of a person's face using other images of that person. The work on "identity-specific priors" can perform deblurring, super-resolution, color-balancing, and exposure correction. Since people often take many pictures of their family and friends, good pictures of a person may often be available for improving a poor one. The work is reported in "Personal photo enhancement using example images," published in ACM Transactions on Graphics

Submitted by Boaz Super

U.K. company Imsense Ltd. announced the release of an improved version of its photo enhancement software imphoto. In addition to improved image quality, the software now has export options specific to the iPad's display size, and to standard Facebook and Twitter image sizes.

University of Washington (UW) and Cornell University researchers are developing PhotoCity, a system to create 3D renderings of buildings and cities from unstructured collections of 2D digital photos. To improve the quality of the 3D renderings, the researchers plan to use a social game for users to add images where needed. More information is available in a New York Times article.

The technical program for ICCP 2010 (International Conference on Computational Photography) is now available. This year, the conference will take place in the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA , from March 28 to March 30. This year on March 28, ICCP will also host a series of invited talks on the Foundations of Computational Photography.

The ICCP 2010 keynote speakers are:

Adobe Photoshop is celebrating its 20th anniversary with the release of an interesting video with the creators of Photoshop discussing the evolution of the product. The discussion in the video mentions Photoshop’s filters and plugins that enable special image effects.

Researchers at Tel-Aviv University (Israel) and Zhejiang University (P.R.China) have developed algorithms to calculate an image’s aesthetics based on photographers’ rules on composition (object placement, color, and shape). Results from their work are presented at the Eurographics 2010 conference in Norrköping, Sweden, in May, in a paper titled, "Optimizing Photo Composition" (Ligang G. Liu, Renjie J. Chen, Lior Wolf, and Daniel Cohen-Or).

BeFunky.com is a startup company providing on-line services for users to create modified renderings of their photos. Using a large collection of visual effects including sepia, pop-art, and impressionist, users can apply the photo effects with a simple user interface. More information is available in the press release.

Researchers from the University of Girona and the Max Planck Institute have been able to categorize a painting’s artistic style using vision algorithms. The paintings are analyzed for many aspects at different levels:

Igor Berezhnoy, a Ph.D. student at the Tilburg University, has developed a unique computerized method to analyze the authenticity of paintings. His Method for the Extraction of Complementary Colors analyzes color and brush strokes to identify the "fingerprint" of a particular artist. According to the press release, the method has been tested on digital reproductions of Van Gogh’s paintings.