Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs

There is a video at the link, this is some impressive stuff. My jaw hit the floor.

Abstract We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference. Further, our study shows that our method is competitive with other insertion methods while requiring less scene information. We also collected new illumination and reflectance datasets; renderings produced by our system compare well to ground truth. Our system has applications in the movie and gaming industry, as well as home decorating and user content creation, among others.

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs

This could lead to all sorts of fakery in the world, from hoaxers as well as government entities. Be aware. They say in the video it can take as little as ten minutes for anyone to learn and use their "techniques", or software i would suppose.

reply to post by LordBaskettIV


Holy french fries..nice article...well this certainly is going to help someone someday in fabricating some type of visual deception...for all the good some things are made for someone is always going to exploit it for the wrong reasons..

I don't think will make all that big a difference in UFO photos. The Drone folks already did this, anyway.

We hopefully by now have reached the point where we understand that photos by themselves don't mean anything, and that "proof" requires a range of associated, verifiable evidence.

reply to post by LordBaskettIV


I can't get the PDF to download, but since this is a SIGGRAPH release I suspect its a more refined method of doing what has already been possible for sometime by creating a faked HDRI panorama or light probe from an original image.

HDR is easy to fake now and creating a convincing light probe is not all that difficult. The image is used as the lighting source.

Hopefully their download will work later on. Thanks for the heads up.

You can already (practically) do this in all 3d programs..

I could hoax a million photos. I just don't because I'm not a jerk.

I agree, this has been done, but not nearly as easily.It will be used for mundane things like ad placements in re-released movies/shows ect... But look at how the current MSM does whatever it can to sway opinion, they will figure out some way to make this horrible. How can we be sure of anything our government shows us?

reply to post by LordBaskettIV


It's very easy to spot CGI once you have a trained eye.

reply to post by mnmcandiez


Which is not the average person. While anyone who works in the field can tell, most will miss it if its mundane things being slipped in.