Software Realistically Adds 3-D Objects to Old Photos

In this edition of The Full Spectrum, we interview Kevin Karsch, a computer science PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He and his collaborators have developed a method for inserting synthetic objects into photographs without having access to the original location. By marking the rough physical geometry of the scene and the location of light sources within it, users can quickly add digital objects that behave as if they were in the original photo.

Karsch will present his work in Hong Kong next week, at SIGGRAPH Asia 2011. http://www.siggraph.org/asia2011/

Karsch's project page (includes full paper and video): http://kevinkarsch.com/publications/sa11.html
Paul Debevec's light probe research: http://ict.debevec.org/~debevec/#Resources

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• SIGGRAPH Asia
• visual effects
• photographs
• digital effects
• Kevin Karsch
• synthetic objects
• Photoshop
• IEEE Spectrum

[SporkThis]

Is this custom developed software or a set of scripts and algorithms integrated into an existing 3D engine? Blender recently started incorporating camera tracking, the mating of the technologies could yield fantastic results, 3D artists could focus more on the art and less on the mechanics of a filmed space.

[spectrummag]

@SporkThis This is custom software. The authors plan to release a public version some time in the next few months.

[simoncpu]

Where can I download the software? I want to insert Natalie Portman on my pics.

[holyhell5050]

Incredible work!

[BCElginTex]

Great looking results. Thanks for sharing.

[Borangeify]

Impressive :)

[mperezll]

Excelent work!

[p6v53as435fe]

great job

[tkmkirill]

Wow, this is mindblowing :)

[BrokenBjartur]

Thanks, this really shed some light on this.

It would be really, really, REALLY cool if they decided to make this open source or something similar. Having this in Blender would reduce the time/cost barrier for quality CGI.