In the digital age, photos are part of the way we communicate across multiple channels. With over a billion photos uploaded every day, there are bound to be millions of mistakes, photo bombs, and accidental fingers making their way into your otherwise precious images.
A team of computer scientists at Princeton University paired up with Adobe to create a program that can identify and eliminate distracting items from your photos. This innovative software allows you to take an image and make it better using algorithms that can pick up on unwanted items and delete them using a one-click system. This will make it possible to save a great photo that would otherwise be ruined by an unwanted element, simply and easily. While programs like Photoshop already exist to alter images, this requires extra time and a certain level of skill to get it right. Even then, usually the results are less than perfect. Researchers hope that this new software will give casual users the ability to remove unwanted items cleanly with just one click.
By enlisting a number of people to review photo sets, researchers collected data on which elements they identified as distractors. Using this data, they created detectors to find unwanted elements and remove them. So far, the software is not perfect. Foreseeable issues are still being worked out, particularly for more complex photos that make it difficult for the software to identify distractors or properly fill in the areas where items have been removed. Research continues, but this could be an exciting tool for users in the near future.
Read the full article here: http://www.popsci.com/software-automatically-takes-out-distracting-parts-your-photos
