Smart Splice

Smart Splice will save you hours when extracting people and objects from photos.

SMART SPLICE (FOR IPHONE/IPOD)

Stop the tedium of selecting individual pixels! SmartSplice uses advanced graphics algorithms to greatly improve the speed and ease of creating high-quality image selections. SmartSplice even handles boundaries with partial-translucency! Along with the provided image filters, this allows for some very powerful and professional-looking image effects.

Features: (see tutorials for more examples)
(1) Quickly extract image objects with ease.

- Extracted objects can have well-defined or translucent boundaries

- Extracted object can be further refined by user if desired

(2)Insert extracted objects into any image.

- Allows you to change size and position

(3) Filter images for advanced effects.

- Age filter: gives images an old-photo look

- Defocus filter: reduces detail to reduce distractions

- Light bloom: accentuates bright lights to give a soft glow

(4) Save and share all images and extracted image objects.

Image Extraction and Editing is Simple: An Example

A user finger-paints a coarse outline of the desired foreground object (outline shown in green). Note: the outline can be coarse, but should cover the actual object boundary.

The user then uses the “foreground bucket fill” tool to label the foreground with a single tap (label shown in red). SmartSplice then extracts the image object, which is now ready to be used in applications.

Example use 1: The original image is run through the defocus filter and the extracted object (which was captured in-focus) is now re-inserted. Finally, the image is run through the light bloom filter for a soft glow effect.

Example use 2: The image is inserted on top of a novel backdrop image. Light bloom is also applied for a soft glow effect.

Other edits made simple by SmartSplice:

(1) Leave only a specific portion of an image in full color.
(2) Leave only a specific portion of the image in focus.
(3) Splice various objects into a single image.
(4) Paste over unwanted parts of an image.
(5) Extract objects and insert them at different sizes for artistic or comic effect.
(6) Make specific objects glow (via light bloom).
(7) Insert missing people into group photographs.

SmartSplice offers many possibilities. Be creative!

SmartSplice Handles Complicated Boundaries

Although selecting/extracting only certain parts of an image is a vital task in much of image processing, typical photo editing programs (even ones costing hundreds of dollars) provide only rather primitive tools for getting the job done. There are many object boundaries for which even an infinite amount of time with such selection tools will not be enough to produce a good result. The tools are just not capable of handling some tricky cases. Examples include boundaries for hair and fur, and boundaries with partial-transparency. SmartSplice not only makes image selection/extraction fast and simple, it automatically handles these complicated cases. Here is an example:

Here we seek to extract a furry mat. Note that because the fur is very fine, colors on the boundary are neither purely foreground nor purely background. Traditional selection tools like scissors and lassos have no hope of properly extracting such objects.

With SmartSplice, we simply use our finger to coarsely paint over the furry boundary (paint is shown in green). We also specify the interior of the mat as foreground (foreground labeling not depicted here). Then SmartSplice computes a good extraction for us.

Here is the resulting extraction. Note that SmartSplice is able to handle the furry boundary by providing what is called an alpha mask (in addition to the typical color data). The alpha mask specifies, for each pixel, the fraction of color coming from the foreground object (versus background). This information can be used to do proper insertion into other images.

Here is a close-up of part of the boundary. Even if one were to spend hours manually extracting the same object by selecting each and every pixel, one could not get as good a result without also specifying the alpha values for each and every pixel. SmartSplice’s ability to handle such scenarios makes it far superior to the traditional selection tools.

View the tutorials for more information!