algorithm

Clipping Magic Dog

Clipping Magic Helps You Easily Remove Picture Backgrounds

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?

UT Austin Launches Free Enlarging and Denoising Web App

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.

Thermal Cameras Could One Day Have Drunk-Face Recognition

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.

YouTube Offers Face Blurring Technology

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.

Before and After Comparisons of Adobe’s Amazing Image Deblurring Feature

Last week we shared a sneak peek at some jaw-dropping image deblurring technology currently in development at Adobe. The video wasn't the best quality and was captured from the audience, so we didn't get to see the example images very clearly. Adobe has now released an official video of the demo, giving us a better glimpse at what the feature can do.