Software Photoshops Any Image You Want

A research project converts crude sketches into photorealistic scenes using Internet photographs.

Will Knightarchive page

October 6, 2009

This video shows software that can turn crude sketches into remarkably slick Photoshoped images by stitching together photographs grabbed from the Internet.

The software, called PhotoSketch, was created by students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore in China. It will be demoed in December at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.

To use PhotoSketch, a user simply sketches a scene, using blobs to represent different components, with descriptive tags added to each blob. The software uses the tags to search for potentially suitable images on the Internet. It then tries to match the components within those images with those in the sketch and with a background before presenting the user with a selection of snaps that go together nicely. The video also includes a nice explanation of the technology. The resulting images are often very realistically Photoshopped.

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