Camera That Removes People From Background?

it looks like it takes the original photo. And while you hold the camera up it does some motion detection and notices which parts of the background moves around. I bet if the lady (the target in the photo) moved she'd be marked for deletion also.
 
It would need to capture frames from before and remove the "moving bits". It couldn't just take a single still image and invent all the missing crap automatically. So it probably wouldn't work if the background was never visible or people were too stationary.
 
wow that's pretty cool stuff.

This wasn't put out by Google was it? Google has a way to "make you disappear" by a quick alter of their search algorithm. Now they've included the ability to make you disappear from pictures, too? :D
 
It's actually simpler than that. It takes multiple shots before you take the actual picture. In each pre-shot, it looks for differences between it and the other pre-shots and marks those areas to be replaced with the areas that look static. It also does motion stabilization of the pre-shot frames to make sure everything comes out aligned.
 
Looks like some sort of temporal background detection.

- Captures video for a few seconds.
- Apply some motion stabilization.
- Pick out the pixels that changed the least over the course of the video as the "background"
- Pick out clumps of pixels that differ the most from the background.
- Offer to exchange clumps of differing pixels with the generated background image.

There's more to it than that to get a very clean looking final image with no artifacts, but it's not a super-complicated concept. I've seen this done offline in Adobe After Effects before.
 
It does the opposite of what the cameras did in 1917 for Lenin and 1939 for Hitler.
 
Unknown-One said:
...but it's not a super-complicated concept.
Click to expand...

The concept isn't complicated, I just want to see it work just like it did in the video ;)

Video:

3 taps and 10 seconds = perfect picture


Real life:

3 taps

16 follow up taps to remove bits left behind and incomplete cover-ups

45 seconds to a minute and a half for the new picture to show up at which point you think your camera froze...

TADAA!!! (girl in the picture still has red-eye ;) )
 
This is one of those super easy things to do in photoshop, so not surprising it's in an easy-to-use phone app now.
 
I want my phone to do that. Hell, I want any camera I own from now on to do that.

As long as it's smooth, I don't need a phone camera to piss me off any more than they do in general.
 
Phatal said:
Photoshop has this ability. It's called Content-Aware Fill.
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/cs5/new-features/fill-content-aware/

Now if a phone app can incorporate that into a device as it was shown in that video I'd be mighty impressed.
Click to expand...
This is NOT the same as content-aware fill.

Content-aware fill has to attempt to "make up" the replaced area by examining nothing but the surrounding image. This means the data that replaces the removed object is entirely fake and often has artifacts.

What this camera is doing is more akin to taking a clean plate (a photo of just the background with no people), then taking a snapshot of the person with some unwanted people int he background. You simply put the new photo on top of the clean photo and mask out the people that you don't want from the new photo.

The latter is easy to do in Photoshop, but getting two source photos like that is tricky (especially outdoors where the lighting changes constantly).
 
Innovation at work...might be simple.. but to come up with it?... brillant.
 
Is the camera already scanning the area before you even hit the snap button? Because I cannot imagine how it could fill in the background of the removed people if the data/image is captured at the moment of snapping.
 
I'd like to see how it works with REALLY crowded places, like Disneyland on a super busy summer and you want to get that picture of Mickey with the Castle in the background... somehow I'm thinking if there's a wall of people and it can't ever see the "non-moving" stuff it won't work as well.
 
Forget just people in the background, lets talk about people in the foreground as well. There is no end to the running I have to do on a regular basis to get pristine landscape shots without some dude in a wife-beater popping up dead center in the picture with not way to get him out of the way without waiting for the next dude to show up in his place. :eek:
 
This is actually pretty cool. I'm sure it wont be 100% though, it depends on the people always moving. So it's good for situations where there's lot of things moving in your way and you want to get a picture of what's behind. Probably works for taking a picture of a street and cars keep passing by, for example.

Would be interesting to use it to take a picture of a tree with the branches moving, you could probably partially get the background.
 
That whole video is 100% concept crap that could only work in some very limited circumstances in a controlled environment. For every one scene where this might work as advertised, there's 1000 more where it won't.
 
This looks like it will work great if I remember to bring my camera tripod with me.
 
Advil said:
That whole video is 100% concept crap that could only work in some very limited circumstances in a controlled environment. For every one scene where this might work as advertised, there's 1000 more where it won't.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I mean if some dude is standing in the background eating a sloppy joe it won't be able to get rid of him, except making his arm or something else moving... Also crowded places where the background rarely shows through would be difficult or impossible
 
I do this in Sony Vegas with images and video all the time. Cool to see it in a camera though.

Fight the good fight against photo-bombing!!!!!!!!!!!! :)
 
sfsuphysics said:
I'd like to see how it works with REALLY crowded places, like Disneyland on a super busy summer and you want to get that picture of Mickey with the Castle in the background... somehow I'm thinking if there's a wall of people and it can't ever see the "non-moving" stuff it won't work as well.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this will obviously only work when you get a perfectly clean background at least once over the course of time you're holding it still.

Still, slick effect, hope it makes it into production cameras/phones soon.
 
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