SEMANTIC PHOTOSYNTHESIS
Matthew Johnson, Gabriel Brostow, Jamie Shotton, Ognjen Arandjelovic, Vivek Kwatra and Roberto Cipolla
September 2006
Composite images are synthesized from existing photographs by artists who make concept art, e.g., storyboards for movies or architectural planning. Current techniques allow an artist to fabricate such an image by digitally splicing parts of stock photographs. While these images serve mainly to "quickly" convey how a scene should look, their production is laborious. We propose a technique that allows a person to design a new photograph with substantially less effort. This paper presents a method that generates a composite image when a user types in nouns, such as "boat" and "sand." The artist can optionally design an intended image by specifying other constraints. Our algorithm formulates the constraints as queries to search an automatically annotated image database. The desired photograph, not a collage, is then synthesized using graph-cut optimization, optionally allowing for further user interaction to edit or choose among alternative generated photos. An implementation of our approach, shown in the associated video, demonstrates our contributions of (1) a method for creating specific images with minimal human effort, and (2) a combined algorithm for automatically building an image library with semantic annotations from any photo collection.
If you have difficulty viewing files that end '.gz',
which are gzip compressed, then you may be able to find
tools to uncompress them at the gzip
web site.
If you have difficulty viewing files that are in PostScript, (ending
'.ps' or '.ps.gz'), then you may be able to
find tools to view them at
the gsview
web site.
We have attempted to provide automatically generated PDF copies of documents for which only PostScript versions have previously been available. These are clearly marked in the database - due to the nature of the automatic conversion process, they are likely to be badly aliased when viewed at default resolution on screen by acroread.