Have you ever had a vacation photo that would be perfect except for just one element? Here comes your chance to cleanly erase that hapless dope who wandered into the foreground just as a friendly stranger exhorted a chorus of "Cheese" out of you and your family. A grad student and his adviser at Carnegie Mellon University have designed software that will help users to easily doctor their own photos. [i.e., this program can "automatically" edit digital images, rather than users editing photos themselves via software such as Adobe Photoshop. --Ed.]
Their algorithm uses millions of online photos to suggest fills based on the image data of your photo. In the example they show on the project website, a rooftop is cut out of the foreground of a photo of a bay. The software analyzes the colors and shapes of the photo--the sky, the land, the water--and finds a set of similar images from which to choose a believable fill. In this case, the roof is replaced by moored sailboats.
If their software is as good as it appears, we may never be able to trust a photo again.
--Porter B. Hall
