Shadow Illuminator: From Robotics to Photography — and to Howard.
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.
Shadow Illuminator examines the content of a photograph, estimates the illumination conditions and then brightens shadows. It also enhances details within the shadow. You can upload your pictures on the free website and see how they can be enhanced.
This overview contains more details, references and an example of a picture before and after automatic processing.
I tried the service with a photograph of Howard taken by BusinessWeek back in August.
Here is an original picture scanned from the magazine (Credit: BusinessWeek).
Now, you can see how Shadow Illuminator enhanced Howard’s photo (Credit: BusinessWeek and Shadow Illuminator?).
What do you think of the result?
[Smart Mobs]