Scientists Created a Program that Removes Distractions from Photographs

Popular Science reports that a team of scientists from Princeton University developed a program that can identify distracting elements in the pictures and remove them, according to the paper presented at this year’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference in Boston.

Before they could create the program, scientists had volunteers choose the distractors on various photographs. When the researchers processed the data, they found that distractors were usually small objects near the border of the photos.

When they tested the algorithm on photo samples, the software did well, although it sometimes deleted important elements instead. The researchers hope they can significantly improve the algorithm.

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(Cover photo credit: Depositphotos.)