Students in China have proposed that a technology called PhotoSketch can create an Internet image montage from other photos. The project from 5 Chinese Computer Science and Technology students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore say that their PhotoSketch research paper can create a unique photo using other photos.

All you have to do to create your PhotoSketch is:

1) Create an outline of the figures you want in your photo, e.g. an Airplane, Bird, and a Sunset

2) Create and add labels for each of the outlined items in step 1, as well as for the photo background.

3) The PhotoSketch system will then search for web images that match your outline.

PhotoSketch will then combine them into a Photo Montage. Apparently, the initial results for the PhotoSketch Demo are something beyond what any current automated tool can provide. The Abstract of the system reads as follows; “We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high-quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.” – Tao Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ping Tan, Ariel Shamir, Shi-Min Hu, (Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University & National University of Singapore) The students at T.U and N.U.S have results from a PhotoSketch Demo: Visit http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/main.htm for details