

A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography [pdf] - jestinjoy1
http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/papers/ObstructionFreePhotograpy_SIGGRAPH2015.pdf

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mrb
Very cool. But one inconvenient is that the processing they do removes all
moving objects from the image. Look at page 10 of the paper: the 8 cars
present in the original image on the road are absent from the reflection-free
image.

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baseballmerpeak
If the cars are what you wanted in the picture, it is a shortcoming. However,
they are not part of the background (i.e. static imagery).

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beobab
I would love to have the app which they talk about in this paper on my phone.
I suspect that people would pay good money for this.

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tonylemesmer
This in combination with the software (Microsoft was it?) that composites
photos of people eliminating ones where people aren't smiling or are blinking
would be epic.

Kinda seems like how humans perceive scenes - our brains somehow block out
wire meshes, or raindrops if we are looking through them.

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soylentcola
I believe it was the Photos app in the Windows Live pack that you're thinking
of. Haven't used it in ages but it was a pretty streamlined way for non-
experts to quickly edit snapshots like that without having to do more
complicated stuff in Photoshop.

Not sure if the current photo app does anything similar (or even if Adobe
added something like that to PS/LR) but definitely effective if the source
images were all similar (as in burst photography).

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ghughes
Their ability to recover the reflected image seems valuable to security
agencies.

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jakobegger
Ohhh this is beautiful. I have this childhood memory of my father trying to
take pictures of vases behind glass in the museum, struggling to find an angle
at which the polarization filter would remove most of the reflections on the
glass display case...

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rmc
How come I see videos from academics for really really cool things like this.
But I can't buy an app that does it?

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adrianN
Because academics are paid for papers and turning a paper-ready piece of
software into a consumer-ready piece of software is a lot of work that could
be spent on writing the next paper.

For this particular example I would guess that the implementation is a bunch
of matlab scripts that need manual fiddling to work for a particular input.
Since you don't have matlab on your phone, porting it is quite difficult.

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dr_zoidberg
They mention both the MATLAB scripts and a "C++ windows phone app" developed
internally. Don't know about availability though. Indeed, turning paper
algorithms into real world usable software is challenging, to say the least.

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kazinator
The eyelets in a fence are much larger than your average camera lens. If you
can go right up to the fence, the problem is solved.

Reflections from glass are minimized by also sticking the camera lens right up
to the glass, and providing some shading around it. A simple lens skirt could
be developed for this purpose (if such a thing doesn't exist already).

Possible design: cone-shaped coil spring encased in opaque cloth, with rubber
o-ring gaskets fitted on both ends. One gasket (narrow end) goes on the
camera/phone around the lens, the flared end gasket goes onto the glass.

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leni536
It could be interesting to apply it on existing videos on youtube. It could
reveal some perceptually hidden information out of reflections.

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mirzmaster
Here's the official Siggraph 2015 submission, linking to both the PDF as well
as the demonstration video:

[https://sites.google.com/site/obstructionfreephotography/](https://sites.google.com/site/obstructionfreephotography/)

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jberryman
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e5/Magritte_TheS...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e5/Magritte_TheSonOfMan.jpg)

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bmarx
nice work! what are the applications for that besides taking clean pictures
behind a glass windows or a fence?

Security agencies applying that algorithms to see if they can obtain some
extra information out of the reflected pictures?

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WillyNourson
Ah, the end of the bathroom-mirror selfies ? :D

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jacquesm
This could be a nice feature on a camera, but you'd need a second sensor
offset from the first to make that work.

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gus_massa
From the article:

> _The input to our algorithm is a set of images taken by the user while
> slightly scanning the scene with a camera /phone [...]_

As mrb noticed, this has the side effect that the algorithm removes moving
object from the scene, for example cars.

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jacquesm
Yes, but users don't normally 'scan' a scene, they point, focus and click. So
if you want to have this work without the 'scanning' element you'll need two
offset sensors.

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skyo
This would be a lot like Google's how "artificial lens blur" feature works[1].
I don't think it would be too difficult to teach a user to move their phone a
little to scan the scene.

[1] [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/04/lens-blur-in-
new-...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-google-
camera-app.html)

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baq
examples in the pdf have a CSI zoom-enhance feeling to them... good stuff.

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medecau
TL;DD (Too Large, Didn't Download)

I did search google for "Obstruction free Photography" and there is one video
on youtube that explains the technology and provides examples.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoyNiatRIh4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoyNiatRIh4)

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lqdc13
The file is 31mb. The video you linked is 75 mb in 720p.

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IanCal
However the video is available in 144p, and starts playing before it's
finished loading. The PDF takes (for me) an irritatingly long time to load in
chrome, and the images require me to zoom right in to get even close to the
same resolution as a fairly low quality video stream.

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justwannasing
Well, for me in Chrome, it took 9 seconds, so Chrome has nothing to do with
it. In any case, it's a professional paper for professionals to study and
download time is not an issue.

But all that is OT anyway.

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baseballmerpeak
Enhance. Enhance. Enhance. Just print the damn thing![0]

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiqkclCJsZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiqkclCJsZs)

