Here's a story you might recognize: you save up and book a week's holiday for a long-anticipated pilgrimage to your favorite architectural landmark. Finally the day arrives and you take your best camera, with an empty memory card, to make sure that nothing prevents you from getting that one shot - that perfect shot - which you will treasure forever. But when you arrive, that perfect shot is blocked by hundreds of oblivious tourists, wandering around, pointing, or perhaps even doing their best Power Rangers impersonation. You're left with two options: either abandon your souvenir, or spend hours Photoshopping intruders out of your photo.
Soon though, this kind of inconvenience could be a thing of the past. As reported by The Verge, at their MAX conference hosted last night, Adobe demonstrated an experimental project for smartphones known as "Monument Mode" that can remove tourists from a photograph in a few minutes on site, rather than a few hours back home.
With hosts Kim Chambers and Parks and Rec star Nick Offerman standing in as tourists, Adobe engineer Ashutosh Jagdish Sharma demonstrated how, by simply by holding your smartphone still for a minute or two, Monument Mode is able to differentiate between the static subject of your photograph and the moving tourists to snap the perfect person-free photo.
Monument Mode "uses a new algorithm to distinguish moving objects from fixed ones" according to Adobe, and is currently only a tech preview, with no guarantee that it will progress to full implementation. However The Verge notes that Adobe "has a history of swiftly incorporating technology shown off at its MAX conferences," and Adobe themselves are encouraging users to "share your thoughts about it on social using #MonumentMode and let the developers know what you think," suggesting that with enough support this experimental feature could become a reality.
Story via The Verge.
