Removing Movie Bloopers
For the past decade, conservators have used computer programs like Adobe PhotoShop that allows them to manipulate the digital image and simulate the restoration. But the work is iffy and time-consuming.
"What Sapiro's new program does is automate the process," Kushel says.
The potential use for an inpainting program is as vast as the human capacity to make errors or to do damage.
Sapiro mentions Movie-Mistakes.com, where buffs gleefully point out flaws like the car that drives through the background of a scene in "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring."
The film repairing or replacing process usually involves frame-by-frame restoration. Sapiro's program can automatically remove the blooper and inpaint all frames. Film and special-effects companies have already made inquiries.
The U.S. Navy got involved in backing Sapiro's research because of surveillance, which often depends on remotely transmitted images.
Inpainting Gaps In Military Surveillance
Sapiro has demonstrated that blurry, speckled or even partial surveillance images in which a proportion of the pixels are blank may still hold enough information to inpaint what's missing.
The advantages are twofold: Poor-quality images can be recovered, and images can be deliberately transmitted at lower quality, which is faster, because the lost information can be recovered.
The Navy also is funding research by Andrea Bertozzi, a professor of mathematics at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., who is collaborating with Sapiro.
Coincidentally, the mathematics that underlie Sapiro's inpainting program are similar to the Navier-Stokes equations that describe some motions of fluids like air and water, Bertozzi says.
Sapiro focuses on the propagation of images through space; Bertozzi, on fluids—air around an airplane wing, silicon oil on a wafer or the flow of viscous liquids.
Both Sapiro and Bertozzi anticipate that the mathematics of fluid dynamics should help Sapiro in his work—another example of how scientific convergence can inpaint all sorts of blanks.
|
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
|
