Instant automatic images

With PhotoSketch, you can just draw and label stick figures — and photographic objects matching the label and sketches are combined into an original image montage.

Designed by five Chinese students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore, the software searches the web for photos that match simple freehand sketched objects – simple shapes are all that is required — annotated with text labels. 

“Our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high-quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images,” they say in published reports. It then uses an “image blending algorithm for seamless image composition.”

October 12, 2009