The Visual Media Research Center in Tsinghua’s Department of Computer Science and Technology recently introduced a new system called “Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage”. It is receiving extensive international media attention and is being widely reported on news websites in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Center's work will be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, an international conference for computer graphics, and will be published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, a leading journal in the area of computer graphics.

The proposed system can compose a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The created picture is generated by seamlessly splicing together several photographs which are in agreement with the sketch and text labels. The latter are found by searching the Internet.

Although online image searching generates many inappropriate results, the system is able automatically to select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition by using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. It also provides a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing one to find an optimal combination of discovered images. The picture is then shown to the user for interactive refinement. Experimental results indicate that the method is very successful.

This work reveals a new way to use, filter and compose internet images, and it thus has a high application value.

（From Department of Computer Science and Technology)