Images

Having a baby is perhaps the most life-changing event one can experience, so it’s only natural for proud parents to share the news on their social network of choice. However, in the quest to spread infant-related joy to the world, some parents over-share. Chome-only browser extension Unbaby.me provides a solution to this distinctly modern problem by removing baby photos from your Facebook News Feed and replacing them with pictures of cats, dogs, bacon, or whatever else you'd prefer to see.  Read More

Ever taken a digital photograph and then found out you had missed the fine details that made the scene so impressive visually? Applying a Photoshop sharpen filter may make the photo appear sharper, but such filters are lossy - they actually reduce the amount of fine detail in the image. Until recently, there was very little you could do to improve the image after the shot. That has now changed. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have developed a super-resolution process which pulls unseen details from the nooks and crannies of a single digital photograph. Their process can capture true detail which cannot be seen in the original image - the next "killer app"?  Read More

Alexei Efros and his team of cunning robotics researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an image matching algorithm with which computers can identify similar images regardless of medium. Like humans, the system can match sketches and paintings with photographs of similar subjects, and so perform tasks that have traditionally posed problems to machines, such as pairing a simple sketch of a car with a photograph of the same.  Read More

Google has announced a collaboration with 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums that lets people view over 1,000 high res artwork images and 17 "gigapixel" images while taking a virtual stroll through their galleries using “Street View” technology. While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person, the Google Art Project could be the next best thing for those without the time and money to pop on a plane and trade elbows with crowds of tourists looking to catch a glimpse of what some of the best museums have on offer.  Read More

Computer scientists from the University of Utah have developed computer software that allows editing of "extreme resolution" image files in a matter of seconds, a process that could previously have taken hours. Whereas existing editing suites require the full gigapixel image to be loaded into a computer's memory before manipulation can begin, the new development draws a lower resolution preview image from an externally-stored image into the editing screen. Users are said to benefit from being able to make image-wide modifications in seconds rather than hours and on devices normally not nearly powerful enough for such things.  Read More

Currently, computer search and classification of images is based on the name of the file or folder or on features such as size and date. That’s fine if the name of the file reflects its content but isn’t much good when the file is given an abstract name that only holds meaning to the person providing it. This drawback means companies in the search business, such as Google and Microsoft, are extremely interested in giving computers the ability to automatically interpret the visual contents and video. A technique developed by the University of Granada does just that, allowing pictures to be classified automatically based on whether individuals or specific objects are present in the images.  Read More

The brain’s ability to quickly visually interpret our environment requires such an enormous number of computations it is pretty amazing that it accomplishes this feat so quickly and with seemingly little effort. Coming up with a computer-driven system that can mimic the human brain in visually recognizing objects, however, has proven difficult, but now Euginio Culurciello of Yale’s School of Engineering & Applied Sciences has developed a supercomputer based on the human visual system that operates more quickly and efficiently than ever before.  Read More

There are many factors other than the megapixel count that affect the quality of images a digital camera will produce – sensor size, lens quality, organization of the pixels, etc. However, consumers often use the number of pixels each dollar buys as a basic measure of value for a digital camera and there has been a steady increase in the “pixels per dollar” for new cameras that roughly follows Moore’s Law. Depending on its cost and when it will hit the market, a new APS-H-size CMOS image sensor developed by Canon could put a bit of a dent in that line with its image resolution of approximately 120-megapixels.  Read More

Before you proudly go posting photos of your Ming vase online, you should be aware that computer-savvy burglars can likely use that photo to find out where you live. The same goes for photos or videos of your kids, yourself, or anything else that you don’t want strangers knowing how to locate. The practice of tracking people via their posted images is an example of “cybercasing”, and is possible because many digital cameras and smart phones, including the iPhone, automatically geotag their images by embedding the longitude and latitude at which they were taken. Even when uploaded to a website, the images still retain this information. By plugging the coordinates into a service like Google Street View, getting an address or an identifying landmark is entirely possible.  Read More