The advent of digital photography has opened up a new world of image editing possibilities including the ability to fill-in blanks or replace unwanted parts of an image. A new algorithm devised by James Hayes and Alexei A. Efros of Carnegie Mellon University facilitates this process by drawing on a huge database of more than a million images from the World Wide Web in order to seamlessly fill in the missing areas of incomplete photographs.
There could be many reasons for an image to feature an undesirable blank area – a patch of bright light that needed to be cropped out or perhaps a shadow, a person or an object ruined an otherwise perfect shot.
The algorithm tackles this problem by completing a given image in a number of different ways leaving the user to select the one which is deemed most suitable. This can be achieved without the user having to label the image fragments being used, or for that matter, offer any direction at all.
‘Holes’ in images are ‘patched’ as suitable image fragments are found and re-arranged to complete the image in a manner that is claimed to be semantically valid. That is, the patched area is consistent with the rest of the image. Hays and Efros claim that their algorithm is a means to restore data missing from an image that ‘should have been there’. Existing methods of filling such blank areas have largely involved drawing image fragments from other parts of the same picture. This algorithm is quite unique in that it draws from an exterior database and also in the means by which it achieves this.
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Apple Inc. unveiled a line of slimmer desktop computers on Tuesday in a long-expected update of its iMac brand, positioning it for the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons.
The new iMacs, which will sport thinner aluminum casings, have displays measuring 20 inches and 24 inches and will cost $1,199 to $1,799, depending on their configurations, said Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs at a media event at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.
The cost of the 24-inch iMac has been dropped by $200, and Apple has eliminated the 17-inch iMac computer, Jobs said.
The last update to the iMac line was in September 2006, when Apple introduced a model with a 24-inch screen — its largest — and said the entire model line would be powered by Intel chips instead of ones from International Business Machines Corp.
“Apple has grown two to three times the market for the past several quarters,” said analyst Shannon Cross of Cross Research. “This product launch should position them well for the back-to-school and holiday seasons.”
Apple recently launched the iPhone mobile device in a bid to build a third major product line alongside its Macintosh computers and iPod media players, but desktop and laptop sales still account for the bulk of its revenue.
In its third quarter, Apple sold 634,000 desktops for revenue of $956 million, accounting for about 18 percent of total revenue.
“The iMac has been really successful for us and we’d like to make it even better,” Jobs said. “We’ve managed to make it even thinner than before.”
Apple laptop sales totaled $1.58 billion in its most recently reported quarter. The MacBook laptop line was not affected by Tuesday’s announcement.
Sales of Macintosh computers have grown faster than the overall PC market, but Apple’s share of the market by unit sales is estimated to be less than 5 percent.
Apple has also used the iPod and, now, the iPhone as “halo” products to draw customers into stores and get them interested in its computers.
Jobs also said that the company was adding a software “button” to the iPhone that allows users to upload photos taken with the built-in camera on the iPhone to Apple’s .Mac online data and Web-hosting service.
Apple shares rose $1.30 to $136.55 in afternoon trading on Nasdaq. The stock has risen 59 percent so far this year, largely on anticipation of strong demand for the iPhone and that enthusiasm for the device will translate into stronger sales of other Apple products.
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Firefox is seeing tremendous adoption rates in some parts of the world. In order to perpetuate this growth trend, Mozilla has to continue to find new ways to bring Firefox to a broader audience. Mozilla is tackling this problem from many different angles, but user retention has emerged as a significant priority for the organization’s Firefox promotion efforts.
According to Mozilla, only fifty percent of the people who download Firefox actually try the browser and only about half of the people who try it continue to use it. Although this is a pretty decent user retention rate for a piece of software that can be downloaded for free, Mozilla recognizes that improving retention is probably the most productive way to increase overall market share. Mozilla has been working with the community to devise strategies for improving retention rates, and the result is a 12 point plan for getting users to stick with Firefox.
Mozilla is working on creating a new support site to address documentation issues and plans to create new download and first run pages that are more instructive. On the development side of things, Mozilla plans to make common plug-ins work better out of the box, work on user interface enhancements that make the browsing experience more natural, and make add-ons easier to manage and install. On Windows, Mozilla plans to change the Firefox icon name to make it more apparent to users that the program is a web browser and improve desktop and quicklaunch icon placement to make the program more accessible. Mozilla is also going to work on brand marketing.
User retention is likely a problem for other cross-platform open source software applications as well. Mozilla’s efforts in the area could provide valuable insight into practical methods that could potentially be employed for other open source projects.
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