
PatchMatch: amazing interactive content-aware image editing (SIGGRAPH 09) - bd
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/index.php
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aston
As far as power goes, this technique strictly dominates the seam-carving
method that took the 'net by storm last year. However, it can't top the
simplicity (and hence elegance) of the seam-carving implementation. I doubt
anyone but the original publishers will be able to get a good version of this
going without significant effort. Which might be what they intend...

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10ren
I think the basic idea of randomly trying patches, and hill-climbing around
ones that fit fairly closely, is a simple technique - but potentially very
slow, if there's a low probability of hitting potential matches that can be
improved by hill-climbing. They might have heuristics to improve it: for
selecting likely regions to try (i.e. a prior probability density over the
image); for choosing which neighbouring regions to try to improve a match
(direction & offset); and for various ratios and thresholds (such as when does
a region "fit fairly closely" and tradeoffs between this converges "well
enough" that we won't keep on looking.)

However, I have a feeling that that _haven't_ tuned these heuristics
perfectly. They've just come up with the basic idea, and got it working.
Images that hill-climb well, and user-selected regions that match up well will
be very fast with this technique - the cool thing is that that covers most
images that humans like to look at, and the kinds of edits that humans want to
do. You could construct special cases that this method would perform terribly
at: e.g. a user-selected region that only matches exactly one other region
like that in the image, and such that these two regions do not "almost match"
when they are "almost aligned", but only match when they are perfectly
aligned.

But I bet it works great for most actual images and edits in practice. A few
times, my eyes didn't register all the changes that have been made, because
they look so natural. It also looks like fun.

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ivanstojic
This looks damn amazing. For a person that out of love spends hours fiddling
in Photoshop, this would be a godsend as a filter.

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dxjones
definitely very cool

