Core Facts

• Microsoft Research today launched AutoCollage 2008, a desktop application that allows users to easily compile a set of individual photographs into one seamless collage.

 

• Available to trial from the Microsoft Research download site 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. Having automatically identified interesting parts of pictures, AutoCollage combines the separate pictures into a composite collage by deliberately following natural features as a boundary between images.

 

• There are three main criteria that AutoCollage considers to ensure that it chooses the best images to feature in the collages it creates: 

 

 - Choosing images that are most representative of the overall theme (eg. avoiding duplications, choosing people or groups of people)

 

 - Laying out the images in an interesting way (eg. without one image overly dominating the collage, ensuring important parts of the photo are visible)

 

 - Blending the images together so the joins aren’t visible

 

• AutoCollage runs on Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2 and above, and is available worldwide through a 30-day free trial.  An unrestricted version is available to purchase in the UK and US only at this time from http://research.microsoft.com/autocollage/Download.aspx

Quotes

“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”

Alisson Sol, development manager, Microsoft Research Cambridge

“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”

Carsten Rother, researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge

“AutoCollage is a great way to showcase many favourite holiday moments in just a few collages - to use in my digital scrapbook pages or online photo book.”

Amy Edwards, founder, Scrapbook-Bytes.com

“The software is very simple to use, it's such a timesaver, and will be a boon to digital scrapbookers and people wanting to share their collages with friends and family.”

Valerie Goettsch, owner, DigitalPhotos101.com

Boilerplate Statements

About Microsoft Research
Founded in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Its goals are to enhance the user experience on computing devices, reduce the cost of writing and maintaining software, and invent novel computing technologies. Researchers focus on more than 55 areas of computing and collaborate with leading academic, government and industry researchers to advance the state of the art in such areas as graphics, speech recognition, user-interface research, natural language processing, programming tools and methodologies, operating systems and networking, and the mathematical sciences. Microsoft Research currently employs more than 800 people in six labs located in Redmond, Wash.; Cambridge, Mass.; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Cambridge, England; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India. Microsoft Research collaborates openly with colleges and universities worldwide to enhance the teaching and learning experience, inspire technological innovation, and broadly advance the field of computer science. More information can be found at http://www.research.microsoft.com.

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