
New algorithm could transfer acclaimed photographers’ styles to cellphone photos - intull
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/spruce-your-selfie
======
Mr_P
Here's the original paper:

low-res pdf -
[http://www.connellybarnes.com/work/publications/2014_portrai...](http://www.connellybarnes.com/work/publications/2014_portrait.pdf)

hi-res pdf -
[http://www.connellybarnes.com/work/publications/2014_portrai...](http://www.connellybarnes.com/work/publications/2014_portrait_hires.pdf)

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ChuckMcM
Thanks for the links, the two things that are really interesting to me are
taking the makeup style from the example and applying it to the picture
(preview the made up version of the face) and taking famous actors and
morphing into something "like" them. This would be useful at creating props on
screen where there are pictures from someone's "earlier" life, that could make
them look much more realistic. Fascinating stuff.

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yichang
The main difference of this method is doing the transfer locally - while most
off-the-shelf filters only create global effects.

~~~
jacobolus
How does this compare to Soonmin Bae’s work from a few years ago? (I can go
read the paper, but maybe you have a quick summary?)

(Another of Frédo Durand’s grad students who graduated a while back,
[http://people.csail.mit.edu/soonmin/photolook/](http://people.csail.mit.edu/soonmin/photolook/))

Do you have any plans for future improvements which might reduce the really
distracting color ringing artifacts you get in this current work?

Are there any photographers whose style doesn’t transfer as well? (The ones
you chose all use very high contrast and harsh lighting, with an emphasis on
fine structure detail.)

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yichang
Both papers use multi-scale approach to capture textures in different scales.
While Bae's work is global transfer, this paper uses local transfer. This
paper first uses a technique called "sift flow" in computer vision to compute
the correspondences between example face and input face, and then transfer the
image statistics locally, based on the correspondences.

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dang
Url changed from [http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/30/mit-researchers-create-
an-a...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/30/mit-researchers-create-an-app-that-
turns-selfies-into-works-of-art/), which points to this.

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morbius
More evidence of terrible mainstream scientific reporting. For some reason,
bloggers love to blow every achievement and finding completely out of
proportion.

quantum computing breakthrough ==> scientists invent lightsaber

new photograph analysis algorithm ==> MIT turns selfies into art

These people must have the best imaginations ever.

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sxp
The lawsuits that will happen when someone implements this are going to be
interesting. Artists tend to be very protective over their styles:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibovitz_v._Paramount_Pictures...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibovitz_v._Paramount_Pictures_Corp).

~~~
mc32
I don't think they can successfully copyright their style. Art is all about
using and recycling other people's works. The art would not progress if there
wasn't derivation. Wan't it Picasso who said "Good artists copy, great artists
steal (ideas)"?

Also, artists tend to evolve over time. Few artists like to remain stuck in
one style for fear of being thought as unimaginative or lazy (you could look
into all the flak Ansel Adams gets). Also some like Kinkade made their style
into a business and people expected a certain style so he could not get away
from that.

Most successful photographers evolve their style over time --Winogrand,
Friedlander, Eggleston, Atget, Frank, Moriyama, etc.

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fennecfoxen
Right. If you want something not entirely dissimilar, and available right now
for your photos, visit [http://vsco.co](http://vsco.co) or look for the VSCO
Cam app on the app store.

It doesn't do based-on-image-X matchy-matching but it does good film
emulation.

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edwardio
If you read the article it has absolutely nothing to do with global filters or
film emulation.

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coldtea
The algorithm doesn't, but the results absolutely have.

Celebrated photographers "styles" can be two things:

a) a way of seeing (composition, sense of space, etc, etc)

b) a specific look, based on favorite film stock, preferred lighting schemes,
post-processing etc.

This can immitate the second. Which you can also get, with a more manual
process, from global filter/film emulation, like VSCO.

The local vs global application of the filter doesn't have as much impact in
the final output. It's just a slightly more accurate (b).

~~~
fennecfoxen
It's not just that this can emulate the second. Sometimes VSCO Film _is_ the
second, or at least the foundation for the second. It's kind of swept the
modern photography world by storm.

That said, to the grand-parent poster: I realize that it isn't the same thing
as described in the paper! However, it is available now, and I _was_ using
phrases such as "not entirely unlike" which shouldn't exactly inspire a sense
of precise equivalence...

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Aardwolf
In the beginning of the article I thought it was just some instagram-like
filters with some buzzwords like "selfie" added. But when I saw the video
showing that it can apply the style of one image to the other, that was where
I started to find it awesome! Neat!

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hiphopyo
This is absolutely amazing. Would love to see some demo code up on GitHub.

~~~
yichang
I'm planning to release some demo code before the presentation at August :-)

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contingencies
Someone more familiar with tools for this and located in the US should start a
bounty for submitting the first _imagemagick_ implementation.

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coldtea
It's not like imagemagick has any tradition of these kind of things -- or that
it's ever the first program to get those.

You'd might see something in Gimp long before there's any imagemagick
implementation.

And usually those come from proprietary sources first.

~~~
contingencies
Sure, but it would be useful. I for one would back a bounty.

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joedevon
Did the title of this link change? Didn't it originally say "MIT researchers
turn selfies into art", or something like that?

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lemonSnap
Filters are passe but these are amazingly beautiful. They did a nice job.

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iliaznk
In my days that stuff was just called filters.

~~~
sp332
Now you can give it an example image, and it will automatically make your
image look more like the example.

~~~
iliaznk
That's cool.

