Interactive Digital Photomontage
Aseem
Agarwala1 Mira Dontcheva1
Maneesh
Agrawala2 Steven Drucker2
Alex
Colburn2 Brian Curless1
David
Salesin1,2 Michael Cohen2
1University of
Washington 2Microsoft Research
Abstract
We describe an
interactive, computer-assisted framework for combining parts of a set of
photographs into a single composite picture, a process we call "digital
photomontage." Our framework makes use of two techniques primarily: graph-cut
optimization, to choose good seams within the constituent images so that they
can be combined as seamlessly as possible; and gradient-domain fusion, a process
based on Poisson equations, to further reduce any remaining visible artifacts in
the composite. Also central to the framework is a suite of interactive tools
that allow the user to specify a variety of high-level image objectives, either
globally across the image, or locally through a painting-style interface. Image
objectives are applied independently at each pixel location and generally
involve a function of the pixel values (such as "maximum contrast") drawn from
that same location in the set of source images. Typically, a user applies a
series of image objectives iteratively in order to create a finished composite.
The power of this framework lies in its generality; we show how it can be used
for a wide variety of applications, including "selective composites" (for
instance, group photos in which everyone looks their best), relighting, extended
depth of field, panoramic stitching, clean-plate production, stroboscopic
visualization of movement, and time-lapse mosaics.
Citation
Aseem Agarwala, Mira Dontcheva, Maneesh
Agrawala, Steven Drucker, Alex Colburn, Brian Curless, David Salesin, Michael
Cohen. Interactive Digital Photomontage. ACM Transactions on Graphics
(Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2004), 2004.
Paper
SIGGRAPH
2004 pre-print (6MB PDF)
Video
Video
(7 min, 720x480, 140 MB, MPEG4 AVI)