By Roland Piquepaille
Vladimir Brajovic is a robotics researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. His goal is to give a better vision sense to robots. But in an unexpected side-effect, he developed a smart system to automatically enhance underexposed photos. The result, the Shadow Illuminator, is quite convincing.The Shadow Illuminator, funded through a $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, was developed originally to help robots see better. Using principles based on the physics of how optical images are formed, Shadow Illuminator imitates the vision processes that take place in the human eye. It examines the content of a photograph, estimates the illumination conditions and then brightens shadows. It also enhances details within the shadow.
"Shadow Illuminator is intelligent and works consistently for all pictures," said Brajovic, director of the Computational Sensor Laboratory in Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. "It provides the same results quickly and eliminates the hassle of manually adjusting photographs."
Before going further, let's take an example extracted from the Shadow Illuminator Public Gallery.
Here is an original picture taken by "lasse", from Gothenburg, Sweden (Credit: "lasse" and Shadow Illuminator
Famous quotes containing the words shadow and/or photography:
“O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,—
How then should sound upon Life’s darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death’s imperishable wing?”
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
“Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.”
—Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942)