New Software System for Realistically Adding Objects Into Photos

Researcher Kevin Karsch and his team at the University of Illinois are developing software that lets users easily insert objects into photographs. It seems to have great potential for adding in animated objects with realistic lighting. Could be a powerful tool for all you creative minded shooters out there.

"We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference."

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

 
via [Laughing Squid]
 
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Kenn Tam's picture

Been holding this damn camera in my hand since 1991.
Toronto / New York City

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10 Comments

O, very very nice, i remember studying HDRI ? i think lighting to achieve similar effects but this seems much easier. Thanks for the video!

Just pure craziness!!!!! I don't know if this is good or bad for the photography industry. Brilliant work nonetheless....

That's absolutely brilliant. I got a pang of fear as I watched, wondering if my compositing ability would soon be null and void, but then I remembered that I generally don't composite 3D images with 2D images.

I loved some of the examples, but I'd have liked to see how it dealt with an object with more texture complexity.

Maybe something for Terje Hellesö

That's really Awesome!

Would be great if one could use this technology to relight already taken photos, for instance ad a Profoto strobe to an image.

That is simply amazing. Having a background in 3d modelling and obviously photography I am speechless as to the coding skills to be able to pull something like that off. Inserting 3d into a photo has always been incredibly difficult to pull off, so major kudos points awarded there.
When do we get a product? I can see hundreds of applications for this just from this demo. I'd definitely buy it as a plugin for photoshop.

At first it was awesome , and then it get more and more incredible ...  I love the part where they cast shadows from the trees !

Very impressive stuff.