Category: Extra Geeky

GREYCSTORATION: insane, open source image scaling, denoising, and inpainting

Nicolai Grossman Leave a comment

GREYCSTORATION inpainting sample
(Before & after: inpainting (type removed))

"GREYCSTORATION is an image regularization algorithm which processes an image by locally removing small variations of pixel intensities while preserving significant global image features, such as sharp edges and corners. The most direct application of image regularization is denoising. By extension, it can also be used to inpaint or resize images."

The results of the resizing tool look a lot like Polaroid Time-Zero emulsion manipulations.

Check it out at www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/~dtschump/greycstoration, it’s quite impressive (and free!).

Digitally refocusable photographs: light field photography with a hand-held plenoptic camera

Nicolai Grossman 2 Comments

Plenoptic Camera Sample

Ren Ng, a Ph.D student in the Computer Science department at Stanford says, “For my dissertation I’ve been working on ways of capturing more information about the light inside a camera for enhanced digital photography. My work has spanned both practical and theoretical elements of the problem. On the practical side, we’ve written a paper about a camera that samples the full 4D light field inside the camera in a single photographic exposure. We show that you can use such data to refocus the acquired photograph at different depths after the exposure. The images above, which are focused at different depths, were computed from a single exposure of a prototype camera that we built. We’ve used the prototype to shoot hundreds of light fields. My collaborators on this project were Mathieu Brédif, Gene Duval, and Professors Marc Levoy, Mark Horowitz and Pat Hanrahan.”

Read their paper and see more sample images at the project home page. Don’t miss his paper on Fourier Slice Photography, either!

Inverse head panorama

Nicolai Grossman Leave a comment

Inverse head pano example

“We’re trying to make high quality texture maps for game models. Using an FX-1 psuedo HD Sony camera, (its 1440 pixels, which is Sony’s anamorphic short-hand for a 1920 16:9 image,) placed sideways, I filmed Yoshi as he rotated on a turntable in front of the camera. The bank-robber cap was his idea. This resulted in about 1200 frames of a 360 degree pass around the head.”

Read more at panocamera.com

The world’s first single photon machine

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Roland Piquepaille at ZDNet’s Emerging Technology Blog writes, “Nanotechnologists at the University of Southern California (USC) are building a device dubbed the Einstein Emitter which will deliver a single photon produced by a single electron. At the same time, other researchers at the University of Texas/Austin are developing the detector for this single photon. Together, they are assembling the first real-world photon computer system. These photon machines will first be used in cryptographic devices. But later, these photonic systems might lead to smaller and faster general purpose computers…”

While this doesn’t appear to have any immediate applications for conventional photography, I’m really curious as to what, if any, there could be.

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