Rendering Synthetic Objects Into Old Photographs 134
First time accepted submitter IDarkISwordI writes "A new abstract headed to SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 provides a method for rapid execution of computer graphics, synthesized into photographs with accurate lighting and physics based on limited input from a user and interpretation by their code." The results are impressive; hard to watch the video demo (on linked page) without boggling.
Virtual house dressing (Score:5, Insightful)
This is going to be very useful for real estate sales. No need to move furniture into an empty house for the pictures.
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http://www.news.com.au/money/property/beware-of-real-estate-agents-latest-trick/story-e6frfmd0-1226157834885
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It's just you...
Although you're right to be suspicious. Those are only the 'demo' images.
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The scale looks roughly correct but the perspective looks screwed up...reminds me of some of the early 3D PC games.
With cars they use a healthy dose of fishbowl effect to make the interior of the cars look bigger - and in the case of SUVs, show a view from the windscreen that is either taken from a helicopter or the top of a hill.
Re:Virtual house dressing (Score:4, Interesting)
No problem. Just use context aware fill [youtube.com] to remove the furniture from the image.
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OTOH they might use virtual furniture to hide problematic things (like wet spots on the wall) behind them.
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In one of those pics they hid a fireplace. That's the level of intelligence I expect in the Real Estate industry...
That is indeed quite impressive (Score:3, Insightful)
Especially getting the lighting and the shadows to fit the rest of the image.
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Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any software available for download, only the research paper. (If it's there, and I missed it, please let me know.) Hopefully someone will make a plugin for this, so we can use it in GIMP, PS, etc..
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Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any software available for download, only the research paper.
The release is delayed because the software is limited to only a few useful objects at the moment: Buddha Statue, Dragon Statue, Pool Table and Dead Hooker.
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Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any software available for download, only the research paper.
The release is delayed because the software is limited to only a few useful objects at the moment: Buddha Statue, Dragon Statue, Pool Table and Dead Hooker.
But I need software that can *remove* dead hookers from photos! That's the problem with academia, totally disconnected with the needs of the real world.
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No, no, no. No need for that.
Just add the dead hooker to a lot of photos, see, that's not a real dead hooker in my photo's, it's added with a computer, see, here is the president with the same dead hooker! Instead of trying to hide the proof, invalidate the proof.
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"I've never seen so many dead hookers in all my life!"
"Lord knows I have..."
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Typical case of Whoosh on Slashdot.
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Often software releases for submission to SIGGRAPH, don't appear until the following year. The number of individuals working on the software is quite limited and it may be too buggy still for release. Another possibility, and very unfortunate if so, is if they intend to market this to an interested buyer, which would likely be MANY.
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I've only skimmed the PDF (it's way above my level anyway) but I didn't see any notes about license or copyright. It looks pretty detailed... perhaps enough to allow an open-source project to replicate the software. That would be cool.
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Equal opportunity. Just sell licenses instead of selling the whole package to a single buyer.
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Resynthesizer [logarithmic.net], a plug-in for GIMP. The author also has details of the algorithm used [logarithmic.net] published in his thesis paper.
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posting to undo mod.
signed,
dumbass.
Re:Those photo's look.... (Score:4, Funny)
Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
Re:Those photo's look.... (Score:4, Funny)
mind boggling (Score:1)
This will come in handy... (Score:2)
... the next time someone wants to frame someone else for murder ;P
Too real (Score:5, Interesting)
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Good point. I suspect there will be ways to detect artifacts of such changes, but those could probably be obscured by converting to a low-res format. Grainy-smudgy video has always been the friend of woo-woo purveyors.
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True, but there are fewer and fewer reasons to release grainy video now. Many people have HD capable video camera's on their cellphones. There is no reason for video to be grainy anymore, so low quality video should be the first warning sign that someone may be trying to hide something.
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You mean people believe pictures without wondering whether it's photoshopped?
True, this is much more advanced technology and seems to be amazingly effective, but a good photoshop editor has been able to fool the public for quite a long time now.
Re:Too real (Score:5, Informative)
The best part about this tech is that it does not require a "good" photoshop editor to sort out the light paths and shadows/reflections/etc manually, but just a person willing to graphically describe the scene using a GUI. After that, arbitrary 3D objects can be more-or-less added arbitrarily with uncanny realism.
This includes, perhaps unfortunately, realtors.
(And to the English Nazi(s) reading this: "graphically" and "GUI" are not redundant terms in this context.)
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That'll work as well as DRM does.
Cryptography just doesn't work that way - you can't give the keys to someone (in this case, by putting them in their camera) and 'hope' they won't be able to use them.
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Until some genius^H^H^H^H^H^Hhacker photographs a photograph.
Good point. And it dispels any reason to believe film cameras are safe from digital hacking as well.
Do all the photoshopping you want, print it, photograph it [sheldonbrown.com]. There, you have evidence captured on film.
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Do all the photoshopping you want, print it, photograph it [sheldonbrown.com]. There, you have evidence captured on film.
Ah, but can you do that so it doesn't look like a photograph of a photo?
I suspect that- if done correctly- it would be impossible to tell whether a rephotographed photo had been tampered with digitally- either as an intermediate, or whether it was originally shot in digital.
However, I suspect photographing a photograph would always have telltale signs that it wasn't an original, even if you couldn't tell the nature of what had been photographed- you still have enough reason not to trust it!
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You can order prints on photographic machines at any 1-hour photo these days. Just have a negative made from one of those, or maybe they can go direct to negative.
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Those exist, and have been broken already.
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There is a way to do it right if you assume nobody will take your chips apart.
This is bad assumption, though.
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Of course it's been cracked, it's a DRM-like technology, without at least a TPM chip to make tampering very difficult it stood no chance. Now if the camera uploaded a hash to a Canon server when the pic was taken that would be different...and even then you can take legitimate pics of a guy walking through the woods in a convincing Bigfoot suit.
I think we already got there. (Score:5, Funny)
http://s418.photobucket.com/albums/pp263/Ironic-Mike/?action=view¤t=X-WingonAircraftCarrier.jpg [photobucket.com]
This line is padding.
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Why not? We believe Gadaffi's dead.
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Maybe if it was live? I don't think this sort of stuff can be done in real-time.
Star Trek DS9 had something interesting with Cardassian data technology. Data was stored on crystal "rods", like their version of a flash drive. But there was a "write once" rod that can't be altered after data is finished being written to it. Perhaps we need something like this for verified reporting/journalism.
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Star Trek DS9 had something interesting with Cardassian data technology. Data was stored on crystal "rods", like their version of a flash drive. But there was a "write once" rod that can't be altered after data is finished being written to it. Perhaps we need something like this for verified reporting/journalism.
If you can read the device, you can alter the data and store it to another write-once device. You need a write-once, read-never device. I suggest /dev/null.
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I don't think we're that far off from having the processing power to do this in real time, for simple things at least. I know it's a different technique, but we already have real time line markers painted on the field for (American) football broadcasts, and they even look consistent from multiple camera angles.
I read a sci-fi story a long time ago (early 80s?) in which one of the plot points was hackers (or whatever) hijacking of the outgoing TV signal of a person announcing election results, of some kind
Weeping angel (Score:4, Funny)
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Could a weeping angel be used as a Turing test? Or would a camera recording video also lock one in place? What about a long exposure camera?
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Wow. (Score:2)
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Needs more teapot! (Score:1)
Finally! (Score:2)
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Nice try, no sigar (Score:2)
As long as someone tells you there's fake in the picture, you can still tell what the fake bit is, without using a computer to spot anomalies. It's cool to see that tools get this powerful, but it's not good enough to fake any sharp observer yet, let alone a decent forensic study with computer aid.
Who needs a computer? (Score:3)
The communists under Stalin were "fixing" photographs to remove undesirable people for a long time, many years before electronic computers and graphics were invented. Of course, the undesirable people were removed from real life as well...
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The communists under Stalin were "fixing" photographs to remove undesirable people for a long time, many years before electronic computers and graphics were invented.
Even after Stalin's death, they were removing undesirable people from photographs and movies. Except this time, they were removing Stalin. I have seen one case where, in a video of Stalin walking with (I believe) Lenin, surrounded by Soviet military officers, they superimposed the silhouette of a Soviet officer over Stalins face, facing Lenin and away from the camera.
yay auto-shop (Score:2)
Modern-day Yezhovs [wikipedia.org] already tremble in fear. With this technology, Syria, China (or soon the US) will be able to disappear people by millions! :p
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George Lucas... (Score:4, Funny)
...will have a field day with this. Please, someone keep him away from whatever _is_ left of the original Star Wars film!
Didn't someone once suggest that we refer to these techniques as lucassizing?
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...will have a field day with this. Please, someone keep him away from whatever _is_ left of the original Star Wars film!
How cool, now we can add JarJar to EP4-6. A good idea, me-sa thinks?
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Combine this with this Video (Score:2)
Software? (Score:2)
Why are we trying to baffle future generations? (Score:5, Funny)
So, peak oil arrives, there is a superflu pandemic, 99942 Apophis impacts and blocks out the Sun, etc. etc. we all die.
...then, centuries later, technological civilisation reemerges, and starts analysing data storage devices they dig up. Most of them are unreadable, but they do get fragments of data with which they can start to piece together what happened before The Event.
And what do they find? Pictures of people listening to iPods at the Battle of Stalingrad and Asimo raising the flag at Iwo Jima.
Seems kind of creepy to me (Score:3)
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That exists already to a degree. It just hasn't caught on yet. As well there is a slightly uncanny valley still.
Tron 2.0 by Anonymous below. Here is a YouTube video with a similar thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrI5AHYADRg [youtube.com] .
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It will be. Eye witness testimony is still valid. We trust DNA evidence despite the fact only experts handle the evidence. I don't see this affecting court cases realistically.
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Because there is no DNA evidence, eye witnesses don't exist, and no one has trustworthy cameras?
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Just wait until genetic kits get widespread :-)
Not always, no.
It doesn't matter whether the camera was trustworthy if you can't proof that the picture it allegedly took that way wasn't actually manipulated afterwards. Unlike with analog cameras, you don't have a physical negative as proof.
Maybe we could have cameras which digitally sign their pictures. Then at least faking an original picture would involve reverse-en
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The point of a trustworthy camera is that the original image be available from a source with no stake in the outcome of a trial. For example, if a bank's camera captures a picture of a crime, and that photo is made available to the defense and the prosecution, neither side can manipulate the picture. Most pictures of crimes are going to continue to fall into this category.
Modification by subtraction (Score:4, Interesting)
Given that this approach is able to account for light sources, geometry (perspective) and physical objects in an original image, it should also be able to remove objects and allow for realistic rendering of that loss. Combine that with the capability described in the proposal and the use of photographs as evidence at trial may soon be inadmissible. Or at the very least, a legal team could reasonably claim that a photo had been doctored (whether true or not) and therefore render such evidence unusable by the prosecution.
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Maybe there will be a new class of "Licensed & Bonded Reference Photographers" who work independent of any single entity and whose only job is to produce reference photographs which are cryptographically signed by the camera and the photographer at the time they are taken.
The "client" gets a copy of the photo and the cryptographic signature which they can use to verify that the photo is the "original" and not an altered version.
The cameras would have to be smart, perhaps with the photographer's public k
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Photoshopping evidence (Score:2)
Surprised nobody's mentioned how this could affect unscrupulous media outlets and court cases.
A green-screen alternative? (Score:2)
Instead of recording just the actors live and having to rely on CG to recreate everything else, with this we could film all physical objects live, and decorate it with CG, like an updated form of rotoscoping [wikipedia.org]. I, for one, would welcome the demise of green-screen films. CG is still unconvincing, no matter how much money they keep spending on it. I still notice it. every. single. time.
Only works for asian stuff (Score:2)
like dragons and Buddha. (Joke. I know its at Siggraph Asia.)
Version 2: Moving backgrounds (Score:2)
This is pretty cool but I'm waiting for version two when they extend it to work on video background plates. Shouldn't be that difficult because tracking is a well studied problem.
What's the big deal (Score:1)
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