AN IMAGE processing system that obscures the position from which photographs are taken could help protestors in repressive regimes escape arrest - and give journalists "plausible deniability" over the provenance of leaked photos.
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Their method is to use graphics processors to artificially create photos taken from a perspective where there was no photographer.
"We use a computer-vision technique called view synthesis to combine two or more photographs to create another very realistic-looking one that looks like it was taken from an arbitrary viewpoint," explains Schaffer.
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The photo then goes through a "dewarping" stage, in which straight lines like walls and kerb angles are corrected for the new point of view, and "hole filling", in which nearby pixels are copied to fill in gaps in the image created because some original elements were obscured. The result is pretty convincing, says Schaffer. "There are some image artefacts but they are acceptable," he says (
arxiv.org/abs/1106.2696).
The team intends to make the software open source.
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