Microsoft the new research powerhouse in graphics?

At this week's Siggraph 2007, for more than three decades the most prestigious international conference for academic and industrial computer graphics research, Microsoft researchers will be presenting or co-presenting one out of every eight papers.

Among the technologies are PhotoSynth, deblurring software, Photo Clip Art, and Soft Scissors.

PhotoSynth is image stitching technology taken to a logical extreme. It is a pet area of Szeliski, who joined Microsoft from Digital Equipment Corp.in 1995 and has seen the technology progress from being unable to stitch together two pictures taken at different times of the day to handling 3-D panoramas.

At this year's conference in San Diego, Microsoft research includes image deblurring software (to learn more, watch this Windows movie presentation) that combines a pair of pictures taken in low light -- one blurred from subtle camera shake during a long exposure, the other very grainy because it was taken at regular speed -- to reconstruct a single, high-quality image.

 

Essentially, the software figures out how the camera jiggled and then corrects for that. It then takes the shot, now cleaned up and boasting fine detail, and overlays it on top of the stable but grainy image.

Another presentation, called "Photo Clip Art", describes how to create a global database of photographic clip art that can be used by digital artists. For clip art where lifelike size is important, such as pictures of people, the software can help users figure out the size and scale depending on where in the 3-D background the person is inserted.

 

Still another software, called Soft Scissors, solves the vexing problem of how to cut and paste an image from one background to another if the image's edges -- hair blowing in the wind, blades of grass -- are very complex.

 

Using a conventional PC, Soft Scissors' algorithms are designed to let users do that in real time.

"This could be productized immediately," Szeliski said of Soft Scissors. Other technologies, such as Photo Clip Art, may have to overcome non-technology-related hurdles, such as photo copyright issues, before they can be released.

The papers presented by Microsoft at Siggraph this year and in past years can be downloaded at Microsoft's Web site.