The personalized image search engine, Dreambit, lets people play with different looks. This time, people can explore different styles with hairdos or specific contextual elements.
Computer vision researcher Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman at the University of Washington developed a tool to adapt photos into a different image. With the Dreambit search engine, people can automatically explore different styles just uploading a photo.
Photo credit: University of Washington
Dreambit uses algorithms to explore into the Internet images store to look for similar photos in the category users typed as a search term.
Apart from analyzing the input photo and searching for a subset of internet picture collections, the software also matches the original photo’s face shape, pose, and even expression. Such feature of automatically and accurately synthesizing two photographs is the result of combining algorithms that Kemelmacher-Shlizerman assembled with the huge volume of photos available on the internet.
New image with specific queries or hairdos
Now, if you can dream it, you can visualize it with Dreambit photo engine. All people have to do is to upload a photo, and then the search engine analyzes it to fit pictures into another person’s image. The Dreambit search engine will put people’s face in other photos based on what users enter as a text query. For example, if someone wants to see how they can look in a Victorian style, the Dreambit engine will process the photo and search for several images of Victorian styles for it to put the user’s face on.
Moreover, Dreambit search engine does not only present different looks belonging to a period’s fashion trend, but users can also explore diverse hairstyles, such as dreadlocks, curly or long hair.
Once the Dreambit search engine founds the style requested by users, the new image is colorized accurately fit with the other person’s photo.
That way Dreambit quickly allows users to visualize their faces with different hairstyles or trends.
Interesting practical applications
In contrast to Photoshop, which is a tool that does pretty much the job as Dreambit does, the new search engine stands out because of its automatic and fast software.
While Photoshop matching someone’s face on another photo can take several minutes, the Dreambit search engine can do it in just a matter of seconds and for many photos at once with quite accurate results.
According to Dreambit creator Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, the search engine can have interesting practical application and not only silly usages as it seems to have. In a press release, Kemelmacher-Shlizerman argues that Dreambit can have practical application in law enforcement. The photo engine can be useful for searching missing people as it can also show how the person would look like if they aged (in the case they have been missing for several years) or if their hair has been purposefully changed over time.
“It’s hard to recognize someone by just looking at a face, because we as humans are so biased towards hairstyles and hair colors. With missing children, people often dye their hair or change the style so age-progressing just their face isn’t enough. This is a first step in trying to imagine how a missing person’s appearance might change over time,” notes Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
So, if someone is trying to evade the law by changing looks or if a child has been lost for a long time, the new system can predict how might look like even if appearances’ changes have been done on purpose.
Further on, usefulness for the Dreambit photo engine can be found in the entertainment industry. With the tool, actors and actress can figure out if they fit in a role without previously changing their looks. Actors often change their appearances to fit a new role, Dreambit’s new software can envision how a particular actor or actress might look like in specific hairstyles, colors, appearances or periods of time.
“This is a way to try on different looks or personas without actually changing your physical appearance. While imagining what you’d look like with a new hairstyle is mind blowing, it also lets you experiment with creative imaginative scenarios. The key idea is to find a doppelgänger set – people who look similar enough to you that you can copy certain elements of their appearance, and because the system has hundreds of thousands of photos to choose from, the matching results are spellbinding,” remarks Kemelmacher-Shlizerman.
The project and its initial results will be launched next week, on July 25, during the world’s largest annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, SIGGRAPH 2016.
Although the photo engine is not yet available for public, users can sign up in the Dreambit web page for the beta version. There are plans to make the Dreambit search engine accessible to the public later this year.
Source: Yibada