Now digital photo collaging at your fingertips

BANGALORE, INDIA: Offering new possibilities in making digital photo collage, Microsoft Research, a research wing under Microsoft Corp, today launched AutoCollage 2008, a desktop application that allows users to easily compile a set of individual photographs into one seamless collage.

In just a few clicks, people can transform an unwieldy group of photos – for example, of an event such as a wedding or holiday – into a single collage image that can be printed; used in e-postcards, web pages or desktop backgrounds; or e-mailed to family and friends, said a press release.

Available to trial from the Microsoft Research download site at http://research.microsoft.com/autocollage/Download.aspx, AutoCollage is an advanced computer vision and image-processing program that assembles pictures into a seamless collage using methods such as object recognition and face detection, it said.

"The most significant feature that differentiates AutoCollage is that it offers exceptionally sophisticated blending technology for photographs, powered by state-of-the-art computer vision techniques," said Alisson Sol, development manager at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

AutoCollage considers three main criteria to ensure that it chooses the best images to feature in the collages it creates by choosing images that are most representative of the overall theme, laying out the images in an interesting way and blending the images together so the joins aren't visible.

"We've tested tens of thousands of different collages in the course of our research, and it's really exciting that the positive feedback we've received from our user studies shows we've answered these challenges successfully," said Carsten Rother, researcher in the Computer Vision Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge.