Tag Archives: photo

How to Auto Crop Bulk Photos to a certain aspect ratio?

April 21, 2013
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I read this question on photo.stackexchange.com on how to auto crop images to e.g. 4:3 format e.g. to the format 1000×750.

This reminded me of an age old problem: you can of course auto crop images to always 4:3 / 1000:750 manually or automatically:

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There are zillions of software tools that let you automate this stuff , I usually use Irfanview for my bulk processing.

But… if you would automate this by e.g. putting the crop always in the middle of the photo (instead of starting at 0:0) it could well be that you miss out a part of the photo that you really want to keep in that crop.

For the regular house-garden en kitchen personal photo’s: this will not be a problem. Since you will be the end-user and in the end : who cares? But for a more professional process you will somehow need to determine if there are certain details in a picture you want in the end result before cropping or better said: to determine WHERE to crop.

For any photo’s that are “near” the aspect ratio : probably there is no problem but the farther you go away from the aspect ratio the worse the results will turn out.

image The photo on the left is 200 x 1000 ( width=200 and height= 1000). If I would use the simple batch algorithm above, the resulting image would look like on the right image

So … as you can see in the example above: our algorithm is not that nice: we do not even have the giraffe on the image.

Our customer would not be happy if there was not even a giraffe on the picture.

So we could do several things:

  1. Have some content based image recognition software that determines the most important parts in the image and takes this as “the middle” of the crop area (and hope we catch everything)
  2. If we are outside a certain range of the 640×480 range (lets say 10%) then no longer do an auto crop but “fill” the remaining area with a background color
  3. If we are outside a certain range of the 640×480 range (lets say 10%) then no longer do an auto crop but use some smart image tools to “create” a fill-in for the remaining part of the image.

Option 2 is easy and we can do this with most photo batch processing tools (see thread on stackexchange)

But what about option 1 and option 3? Which software can I use to batch process large amounts of photo’s to perform either 1 or 3 ?

Automatic removal of objects in photos

March 15, 2009
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Do you hate the manual removal of objects in photoshop? Do it automatically.

Although the authors of the original algorithm were kind enough to offer advice and assistance, this tool is by no means an official implementation of their work, and its output should not be taken  as representing the quality obtainable by a full implementation of their algorithm.

This software was written by Michal Zmiri-Yaniv, Moshe Ofry, and Ami Bruker as a final (workshop) project, for a BA degree at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, under the supervision of Tal Hassner.

Apart from removing objects out of photo’s for creating funny effects I was thinking on CBIR: content based image recognition. If it  is possible automatically remove parts that occlude shapes to be recognized (by manual annotation of shape layer after shape layer) it means that CBIR systems can reach a higher percentage of success rates (according to the hypergeometric distribution).

So I made the header of this post “automatic” removal because in combination with CBIR the top layer shapes can be detected automatically which then gives you the set of possible removals of the top layer objects wherafter…. the same process can be done on the resulting image wherafter the same process can be done on the resulting image of the resulting image etc… Maybe we even discover a man standing behind a wall…. (just kidding about the last one).

Promise myself to visit the wsj photo journal every day

February 12, 2009
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Girls displaced by war stood at a makeshift camp near Goma, Congo, Wednesday. Rwandan Hutu rebels are eluding a joint Rwanda-Congo military effort by retreating into the bush. (Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters )

From the wsj photo journal, which I promised myself to visit everyday just now.

:idea: I also noticed how different the photo’s feel when playing different music while looking at them… urm.. well…. uh… try it yourself and see. What is the best song to play with this photo?

Onexposure: top Photo Blogger site

December 20, 2008
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I really enjoyed the magnificent photos at Onexposure. Almost every photograph awed me and produced another emotion. I think I will visit here often.

Onexposure is an artsproject and a photo community with a difference. Take the most talented photobloggers of the web and other famous photographers as well as many serious amateurs, select their best work and put it all in one place – there you have Onexposure. Everyone is welcome to contribute, but every photo is screened, which means it has to be approved by an editor before being published. Onexposure is like a constantly evolving high class photo gallery with new art every day. We don’t judge over good and bad, or over art, we merely decide if a photo fits into our gallery or not. Like in an arts gallery, you can buy many of the photos as prints and hang them on your wall. Onexposure also offers a premium membership, which includes unlimited image hosting and your own professional homepage with complete control over what photos to display.

We created Onexposure because we missed an online collection of only high quality photos, we thought the photo critique was too brief on other sites and we wanted a site that was elegant and easy to navigate. Our mission is to be a source of inspiration and ultimately finding the sublime together, but if the latter doesn’t succeed we believe that everyone will develop as photographers and make some friends along the journey.

Social Network Hyves destroyed my reputation

July 24, 2008
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Today my ex NATO buddy “Darknok” joined me on Hyves. For years I have told my non-army friends and my wife my uber cool and exciting army stories and now … it is all destroyed because Darnok put up the evidence in his photo album in Hyves :) hahaha. I’m wasted! I will share 3 foto’s out of it, since I’m on 2 solely and it doesn’t hurt anyone’s privacy. The third has been made unrecognizable because of the high NATO Top Secret classification we got as cryptography unit (*proest* hahahah) in a highly secured base (which is the truth actually).

Anyway, the photo’s brought back memories from long ago and I suddenly remembered some details:

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This is me, with a very bad haircut and not looking good. Probably I had drunk a liter wodka the evening before, I don’t know. I am cleaning my UZI.

You had this tool set and then you had to take apart the UZI and clean every teenie weenie part of it. If you did not it could be a little bit dangerous as on one practice one of them exploded in my face but luckily the bits and pieces flew all around me.

The red thing on top of it is the security thingie, so that N00bs don’t kill anyone with a loaded gun while running through the woods.

Cleaning these things was really HZB work.

Then you see my locker behind me which had to be perfect. Meaning: the t-shirts should be EXACTLY the same size folded and VERY neatly on top of each other. It was pretty handy, these uniforms since you didn’t have to think on what to wear each day.

Left to the closet you see the “porno-lat”. Only on the “porno-lat” (I don’t know the english word) it was allowed to place porno.

But I didn’t place much porno as you can see on the following photo:

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This was the other side of our room in Krefeld, Germany. It was an English-Dutch NATO base. While the English ran around with BIG loaded guns we had these teenie weenie uzzies.

On the back you see that I have a t-shirt from “Studio 1” in Blanes, Spain. I won it in a drinking contest in Spain (but I don’t remember the details). Apparently I was totally fan of Prince since there is a huge amount of Prince logo’s and pictures up on it. there is only little porno on it. To right a nice girl from Playboy and to the bottom some other girl from Penthouse (pink colors were forbidden). Gosh, this is long ago.

The bed had to be made neatly in the morning before room inspection. It had to be crisp or else you could start over. The boots had to be shining and we use all kinds of tricks to make hem even shinier.

We have a little tv here, I don’t know if I brought it or if it was already there. I actually entered the base when the squadron(s) were busy digging their own cable tv. So I digged a lot! In the rest of the room in Krefeld there were 2 other beds from two other buddies, one of them being Darnok. We had really a great time together.

On the bottom you see a little milk carton thingie, around the corner you could get sandwiches and drinks from a vending machine. Since it is there I think it was 10.30 when we had a 1/2 hour break. On the other hand: I’m not wearing uniform, so I don’t have a clue.

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I think this is from the last day in Krefeld, before the port.

Here you see my buddies. Three of them are on Hyves. One I have the e-mail address from. One is totally missing and one is not on the photo and I don’t have a clue how to locate him.

Actually… I think this photo was taken after I was already on my way home.

Well what can I say. Great memories! Thanks for putting the photo’s up Darnok!

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