Vinayak Hegde

Computer Graphics is one of the few fields in computer science which has immediate applications in the real world. The only other field in Computer science in which time from academic innovation to time-to-market is comparable is Computer Networking. Computer graphics derives from and drives a whole lot of related fields such as computer architecture, programming languages and physics. SIGGRAPH is “The Conference” if you are interested in anything related to computer graphics. The papers submitted are top-notch with more than a few techniques described in the papers making their way to movie theaters in the form of computer graphics.

Since I am an amateur photographer, I am generally interested in papers and techniques related to photography. Below are two of my favorite papers from the SIGGRAPH conferences of the this year and past year.

Enhancing Videos using Photographs

A recent paper which was presented at SIGGRAPH was really mind blowing. You can use high resolution photographs to improve the quality of an video with dramatic results. Also by adding effects to a series of frames or to the photographs you can do a variety of transformations on the video such as transfer better exposure from images to photograph or add high dynamic range or even add, touchup or remove objects. The video is worth a million words.

The paper (Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene) is available for download. This paper was presented in SIGGRAPH 2008 which concluded recently.

Seam Carving.

Seam carving uses the information in the picture to retain the important features of the photograph while resizing. So when you resize a photograph inconsistent with the proportional dimensions of the original photo – either the relative size of the important objects in the photo will diminish or they will expand giving an unreal or distorted feel to the whole photograph. Seam carving does away with this. The video below actually demonstrates the technique. Neat.

The paper (Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing) is available at the authors site for download. Something like this would be interesting to have in the GIMP. This paper was presented in SIGGRAPH 2007.

Interestingly the first edition of SIGGRAPH Asia is happening in Singapore from Dec 10-13, 2008.