New Technologies

1. Check Imaging System

(Shifting transactions from the branch to ATMs.)

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2. KORG Nanokey USB Keyboard

(Playing your music whenever and wherever the inspiration strikes you.)

Sketch2Photo!! : Sketch it & Find it

The new technology that enables users, such as designers, web creators, or general users, to find the most appropriate images for their works easily and efficiently.

Have you ever had a hard time to find pictures that are specifically related to your presentation? If you have stored a huge amount of unorganized pictures in your computer, you might have to spend a good couple of hours to find the right photo for use in your design work.

Everybody will agree that it is not an easy task to quickly use the appropriate pictures or images that satisfies your needs. Now you need not worry so much. Researchers from Tsinghua University, China, have presented a system, Sketch2Photo, that searches realistic pictures from a sketch with text labels provided by users. The demo video below explains how Sketch2Photo works.

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

General Pipeline

Basically, when we want to find or compose an image with a certain concept, all we need to do is draw a simple freehand sketch and write text labels. Then the system automatically converts the sketch into a set of photo-realistic pictures that pulled up right from the internet.

Even though the system initially provides users with raw search results from the internet image search, Sketch2Photo automatically sorts those pictures out to get desirable images. Moreover, users can remove useless images by using a filtering scheme.

The system also optimaze the chosen images into a final picture by implementing a novel image blending technique, improved Poisson blending, and alpha blending.

Finally the system offers numerically ranked images for user selection according to estimated quality.

Here are some examples of output.

Sketch2Photo will introduce us to a new kind of Web search. Search algorithms will not only allow us to navigate text information, but also photo images.

Source: http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/