PhotoSketch

This year two tools similar to Sketch-2-Collage have appeared published in SIGGRAPH. Both are called PhotoSketch, which is quite confusing... Let me briefly introduce them.

PhotoSketch (French one)

This work appeared in a talk in SIGGRAPH 2009 this year, in New Orleans (I was there!). With this PhotoSketch application you can also create image collages searching image databases. The image descriptors are mostly based on shapes, so you trace lines, while in Sketch-2-Collage I decided to give more importance to color. This is because I wanted to replicate the color arrangement of the sketch drawn by the user to that of the final composition. That is the reason why if you feedback the collage to the image search engine you can improve retrieval accuracy, as I show in this paper. The cool stuff of this tool is the user interface. I like that you pain directly over the resulting collage. Perhaps we could do that in Sketch-To-Collage and avoid opening so many windows!

The authors refer to my SIGGRAPH 2007 poster, and claim that their system works with large databases (whatever large means...). I guess they didn't try Sketch-To-Collage, because the image signature is so small that you could fit the signature of millions of images in RAM, and just accessing to it linearly, with any kind of optimization, I get real-time response. Check the response of their system in their video and compare to mine, to see what I mean.


PhotoSketch (Chinese one)

This work is gonna appear in SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 (December, Yokohama, Japan). This system implements almost the same stuff I do for compositing, although the searching part has the same difference I explained in the previous work. As in the French PhotoSketch, they basically use lines to find shapes and you need to add keywords for the searches (in Sketch-To-Collage you can also add keywords). I like how they improved the cutting operation (I use Drag&Drop pasting), but I'm not sure about the improvement of the Poisson image blending operator (I also use a modified version of Poisson blending). The cool thing of this paper is that it automatically creates several plausible collages, so everything is pretty automatic. We could try something similar in Sketch-To-Collage, instead of leaving all the process as interactive. At least have it as an option, and if you don't like it you can always interact with the system. Anyway, this PhotoSketch looks cool but in the video you can't see the system working, just a small part of the painting interface. Their "online demo" is offline, so I can't judge properly at the moment.

Similar as it is to Sketch-To-Collage they could at least put a reference to my work. Well, at least they decided to "steal" the French name, PhotoSketch, and not Sketch-To-Collage ;)