Jay Goldman

Being somewhat in the design field, I always keep an eye out for cool things happening in the image and video manipulation worlds. I still remember Photoshop 4 with some fondness — long before the arrival of fancy things like layers and smart objects — so it’s with a healthy dose of amazement sauce that I watched some recent videos. Two things in particular stood out:

Seam Carving

From their website:

Seam carving is an image resizing algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing pixels from (or adding pixels to) the image that carry little importance.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working on a design for a website or print piece and needed an image that was a little wider or shorter than the one I had (especially if the one I had came from a client and was the result of a very expensive photo shoot that couldn’t possibly be reshot to get a little more x in the y). Seam carving fits liberally into the Arthur C. Clarke camp of any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic as you watch it seemingly create more image from nothing (or remove people completely!). The technology makes its commercial debut in Adobe Photoshop CS4 as Content-Aware Resizing (scroll about halfway down and click the thumbnail for an overlay with a video preview).

ZunaVision

Developed by some clever researchers at Stanford, ZunaVision analyzes an uploaded video and then maps other videos or still images onto its surfaces.

You may have seen something similar if you’ve played a video game that uses the Massive engine to insert ads into gameplay. Their website doesn’t seem to have any video examples (or really any images other than the shot on the homepage), but a quick YouTube search turned up their demo reel:

Their tag line at the end — “The medium of the next generation” — may have McLuhan spinning over his grave (but there’s no message!), but it’s probably not that far off the truth.

The Blurry Line

They’re moving the line of reality that you can perceive unaided further and further along the continum. It will probably always be true that we will be able to tell the authenticity of any given piece of media if we understand the current technological limitations, but tools like this give us the ability to blur the reality of the past. The admissibility of photographs as evidence is becoming more and more suspect as it becomes easier and easier to manipulate them — I’ve taken people out of photos and changed the colour of clothing in Photoshop and I’m by no means an expert. Something like Seam Carving makes it a piece of cake to do and, unless it leaves behind some telltale patterns, is very difficult to detect without considerable effort. ZunaVision is the beginning of the same end for video as it moves into the realm of easy and undectable manipulation.