Ridiculously cool 2d to 3d software

The researchers of Carnegie Mellon University have managed to create software that will turn a completely two dimensional image into a three dimensional image.  The effect is stunning, and very realistic. 

I suggest watching the video, as the image hasn’t the ability to demonstrate this amazing technology.  Digging around the Internet a little, I was able to locate the website for the Researchers of Carnegie Mellon University.  I was surprised to find that anyone can download the program, Automatic Photo Popup, for personal use.

There is of course, a catch. There is a main executable that can only be used on a command prompt, and a MatLab V7 Library executable that must be downloaded and installed prior to the use of Photo Popup.  The MatLab V7 Library is a 100 Megabyte download!

Unfortunately, after two hours of playing with this program, I was unable to get it to work successfully. After I finally had all the files set up, the program ran from the command prompt for about 2 minutes until I received the error message “Out Of Memory”.  Quite possibly this is not meant to be ran on a standard computer.

The files needed to input to the program consist of:

1. An image in RGB format (JPG, JPEG)
2. A superpixel Image

The superpixel image is an RGB image that is segmented as in the example below:

  It seems easy enough, but software is required to make this segmented image.  The readme file that came with this program suggests using the program Efficient Graph Based Image Segmentation.  Unfortunately, the image segmentation software only comes in source code. At that point, I was not willing to install my Visual Studio software just to compile it.

I was able to find another program that has a Win32 executable, but I am not sure that this program will produce the desired files necessary for Photo Popup.  The program is named EdgeFlow, and can be found at The Image Processing And Vision Research Labs.

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