Entries tagged with microsoft research cambridge - Channel 10

AutoCollage: A New Tool From Microsoft Research

sarahintampa — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:12:00 GMT

AutoCollage is a new photo mashup tool from Microsoft Research Cambridge which allows you to automatically create collages from a collection of your photos. The software cuts out interesting parts of the photos in your collection and pieces them together following natural features as boundaries between images. The photos are then blended together using sophisticated computer vision technology as well as other software which does face detection, object recognition, image blending, and other graphic techniques. The end result is a collage created from your very own photos.

Although the software is doing pretty complex stuff on the back end, the front end is surprisingly easy to use. You just point it to a folder containing your photos and click a button - that's it! AutoCollage will then goes to work. When the collage is complete - a process that only takes a few seconds - your resulting image can be printed, emailed, or set as your desktop wallpaper.

For great results, it's suggested that you use 7-30 photos for the best performance, but the software defaults to 12. AutoCollage works on both Vista and XP SP2+ and is available as a free download from here.

Innovation Day - PLANETS

lorigros — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:50:00 GMT

Auf Innovation Day in Brüssel habe ich mit Wolfgang Keber von DIaLOGIKa über PLANETS gesprochen. PLANETS bedeutet “Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services” und es ist ein EU-Forschungsprojekt, das um die Langzeitarchivierung vom elektronischen Datum geht. Das PLANETS Projekt vereint nationale Bibliotheken, Archive, Universitäten, Forschungsinstitute und Technologie-Unternehmen, um die Probleme und Anforderungen der Langzeitarchivierung abzuschätzen und geeignete Tools und Strategien zur Archivierung zu entwickeln.

DIaLOGIKa arbeitet mit Microsoft Research in Cambridge zusammen, um geeignete Tools zur Konvertierung zwischen Office-Formaten zu identifizieren und sie in das PLANETS Interoperability Framework zu integrieren.

Mehr Informationen zu PLANETS finden sich hier: http://www.planets-project.eu/

Innovation Day - Big Board

lorigros — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:58:00 GMT

At Innovation Day in Brussels, Phil Gosset from Microsoft Research in Cambridge showed me Big Board, which is a project they have developed with the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Big Board is an easy way for people to download information for free. How does it work? Basically there is a board somewhere that has images on it. All you need is a standard camera phone with Bluetooth and you can take a photo of whatever interests you. You then send the photo via Bluetooth to the board. The board detects which image was sent and then sends back the information related to this image. The board can send information such as video, audio or text files without using the network. It is a great solution for a country like South Africa where camera phones are fairly common, but people may not have the money or credits to send information via the mobile network.