Thursday1

Here are some of the highlights of the last 3 days.
http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/resources/hdr/hdrmpeg/MPEG for High Definition - Backward compatible HDR Mpeg compression.
The results of the mpeg compression were great. I think this is the winner of the different compression methods as it is backwards compatible.

http://www.thinkforward.org/Art - Creating organic mosaics using algorithm created by artist. He has developed a way to take an image, define the 'edges', add a mosaic and have the algorithm find the size and color from the underlying image.

http://www.crudeoils.us/Art - Crudeoils 3D drawing of a dark space using laser pointer.
He used red and blue 3D glasses.

http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/PolarizationSIGGRAPH06/Technique for matting - Realtime triangulation matting using passive polarization
Blue screen - green screen and now polarized screen - no spill on subject!

The big theme for Siggraph was definitely capturing and manipulating still and video images to extract mattes, recover data, or visualize this data in a new way. The techniques used were often extracting black and white images, extracting the edges, using gaussian blur and then reassembling the image to remove motion or camera blur etc.

The newest software and techniques are now using the OpenEXR format. Check out the software "Nuke" http://www.d2software.com/.

One interesting plugin for photoshop was Color Space CAD
http://www.fytos.com/color It used a 3D model of the color space to manipulate the image and created much nicer color changes than any other color filters in photoshop.