15-463: Project 2: Some Focus on Miniatures

Student: Kristin Siu (kasiu)

Implementation

My implementation for this project was in Matlab (although I can't say that I'm as terribly enchanted with the program as I was initially after this assignment).

Algorithm Outline

The basic outline can be considered as follows:

Takes input image.
Uses Matlab's roipoly function to define a region of interest
Creates a mask based on the region of interest
Pads the image and mask in order to avoid black regions resulting from gaussian filtering.
Seperates the images into channels (in order to use roifilter2) and runs gaussians on the masked areas. This is done for a number of iterations, with the mask dilated each time.
Recombines the channels and crops the image back to its original size.
Converts to an HSV image to increase saturation and reconverts back to RGB.

Sample Algorithm Runs


Input image is some tasty sushi:	Thanks to Matlab, we can automatically select interesting regions.	The final image using the mask with increased saturation:

Comments

Admittedly, it's not particularly efficient, especially when the channels need to be seperated. My unfortunate lack of Matlab expertise has not led me to a better solution than roifilter2 for applying filters over a reigon that does not require writing the function manually.

Results!

Class Images

The following are the 3 stock images provided with the assignment.

Chosen Images

The sushi was fun. It reminded me of those fun Japanese erasers shaped like sushi, although the realism makes it look less like a miniature.

A nice garden scene from Phipps Conservatory...mmm....cute pond.

The snowy day picture required two passes: one for the trees on the bottom, followed by a more refined blur up on top.

I wanted to see what miniaturizing a miniature was like, so I tried this on a picture of the train setup from last year's Spring Flower show at Phipps Conservatory.

References/Credits

The sushi was a simple Google search at: http://dyhp.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/sushi1.jpg

All of the other pictures are ones that I've taken myself.

Many thanks to edbutler for lending me his camera and trekking out in the snow to take pictures with me.