algorithm

How many photos did you come home with from your last professional shoot? Whether that number is several hundred or several thousand, that's a lot of photos to cull through, and a new Artificial Intelligence software called Picturesqe thinks it can help.

Face swap camera apps are all the rage these days, and Facebook even acquired one this month to get into the game. But the technology is getting more and more creepy: you can now hijack someone else's face in real-time video.

The backlash has begun. A day after Instagram announced that its feed will soon be ordered by a Facebook-style curation algorithm, over 100,000+ people have signed an online petition to "Keep Instagram Chronological."

Microsoft has launched a new camera app for iPhones that's designed to help you take the perfect selfie. It's called Microsoft Selfie, and it uses some of Microsoft's latest technology to auto-tweak snapshots of your face.

The braniacs at MIT have created an algorithm to determine the “memorability” of a photograph. The deep learning-based technology “learned” what makes a photo memorable by evaluating the rankings from 5,000 human volunteers, and even indicates which portions of an image it considers to be memorable with a heatmap depiction. The algorithm is allegedly as good as a human in determining what makes a memorable photograph.

But ranking a photo based purely on aesthetics isn’t necessarily how humans associate photographs. Context matters. Where was I? What was I doing? What is this photo representative of? I decided to test the algorithm against TIME magazine’s top 10 photos of 2015.

Some photographs have the power to burn themselves into our memories for a long time, while others are easily forgettable after they're seen. Scientists are MIT have been researching the science behind memorable images, and now they've created a web app called LaMem that can analyze any photo and assign it a memorability score.

Adobe's Content Aware Fill makes it easy to remove distracting elements in photos using Photoshop, but soon you may not have to. Computer vision scientists at Adobe and Princeton are working on a new technology called "distraction prediction" that can automatically find and remove distracting elements from photos.

Scientists have created a new algorithm that can magically give photos the look of famous paintings by old masters.

Researchers at Google and MIT have figured out a way to automatically remove reflections and obstructions from photographs, and their latest demo of the technology is amazing.

Check out the 6.5-minute video above for an explanation of the algorithm and some examples of what it can do.

A new website, IsItNude.com, has set out on a mission to help identify whether or not photographs contain nudity. California-based algorithm company, Algorithmia, designed the custom code for a client, but you can use the above link to test it out for yourself. If interested, you can even pay to use the system within your own application or website.

Time-lapses are usually created with one or more cameras by one or more photographers working together to document a particular subject, but now scientists have created a new method of time-lapse creation that uses photographs found on the Internet.

Photographers often use products such as the Lens Skirt when shooting through windows in order to reduce or remove reflections. Thanks to advances in computer algorithms, those physical tricks may soon find themselves alongside suitable software solutions.

Scientists at MIT have created an algorithm that can automatically remove reflections from photos that were taken through windows.

Could machines be trained to tell the difference between a beautiful portrait photo and a not-so-pleasing one? Beauty is pretty subjective, but scientists are trying to boil down the common properties of beautiful digital portrait photos so that a computer can be trained to spot them. Along the way, they're revealing interesting new things about what people look for in portraits.

Impossible image enhancing is a well-known cliche in movies and TV shows. When law enforcement computer whizzes get their hands on a photograph or video still frame, anything seems to be possible.

It seems a movie finally got image enhancing right. The 36-second clip above is from the 2014 movie Algorithm, a movie that's (fittingly) about a freelance computer hacker who discovers a shady government program.

At the Adobe MAX 2014 conference this past week, Adobe showed off some of the crazy technology current brewing in the company's labs. Two of them offer a glimpse at what may soon be available to photographers in Photoshop: changing the time of day (i.e. lighting) in photographs with a simple slider and removing haze from a scene automatically.

Researchers at Brown University have created an intriguing little algorithm that allows you to alter the weather, time of day and even season in your outdoor photographs.

A photographer's primary concern when taking a photo might not be "I wonder how many likes this will get," but being able to gauge popularity could still come in handy when you're trying to decide which photos to upload to your favorite sharing site.

Enter MIT PhD candidate Aditya Khosla and his new algorithm that does just that: tells you how popular your photos will be before you even upload them.

For you and me, RGB color spaces may just be an obscure but important mechanism towards achieving properly color-balanced photos. For a certain group of image nerds, however, it's the whole enchilada.

As post-production software continues to become more and more powerful, researchers are doing their best to keep up by developing new methods of spotting digital photo fakes. In the past, we've seen that noise patterns and even Twitter trends can help spot fakes, but a new method out of UC Berkeley is taking a look at something else entirely: the shadows.

As humans, it's only natural to take a look at the sky and perceive to see an object, a face, an animal. Computers, too, are capable of this perception. However, they may be capable of finding things that the human eye can't, or just might not notice.

In a project called "Cloud Face", Seoul, South Korea-based Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun of aptly-named 'Shinseungback Kimyonghun' have pointed cameras up at the sky and let complex algorithms detect faces in the passing clouds.

Here's a tool you may not have heard about but may useful at some time in the future. It's called Clipping Magic, and it's designed to remove backgrounds from user-uploaded pictures.

The concept is rather simple, you upload an image, mark the areas in the background you don't want in red, and mark the areas in the foreground you do want in green. The website's algorithm takes over and (hopefully) produces a background-free picture. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But how does it fare when used for an image with a background you actually want to remove?

Movies and TV shows have a knack for making it seem as if you could take a horrible, low-resolution image and turn it into a high-res masterpiece -- the term "enhance" has become almost comical. And for every mention of magical television enhancement, there's mention of some special algorithm at work that makes it happen.

Well, the University of Texas at Austin's RCM Tools web app isn't quite up to cable drama standards, but it's their attempt to apply special algorithms to image enhancement and denoising, and it's free for photographers to experiment with.

Over the past decade, many airports around the world have adopted special thermal cameras that can determine whether or not a passenger has a fever. The goal of these cameras is to prevent infectious diseases from spreading and causing an epidemic (or pandemic). Greek scientists Georgia Koukiou and Vassilis Anastassopoulos recently came up with a similar concept, except their thermal camera is used to detect drunk people instead of contagious people.

As people snap more and more digital photos, being able to organize those photos into useful sets is becoming …

YouTube just announced a useful new feature: an easy face blur option. The announcement says the feature is aimed for news and human rights agencies to protect privacy and identities especially if posting images of activists who may need to remain anonymous or if minors are present in the videos and privacy is a concern.

“Super-Resolution From a Single Image” is an interesting research page by computer scientists …

Here’s a video overview of some interesting research that’s being done in the area of video processing. By taking …

What if all advertising photos came with a number that revealed the degree to which they were Photoshopped? We …

Xerox is showing off a new tool called Aesthetic Image Search over on …