This video was shown at Siggraph Asia 2009 and frankly…blew my mind.

The program is called Sketch2Photo, and the name pretty much says exactly what it’s designed to do. The gist is you draw a sketch on a computer connected to the net, label those line drawings (i.e. a person=person), and then the program goes onto the web and finds candidate pictures that match the contours your draw. The next step uses some pretty slick auto-rotoscoping techniques to then match the composition you drew and, VUALA!

Too good to be true? Well watch the video below to decide for yourself.

I really hope that it’s everything it promises to be and more, because I could think of a few uses for VFX artists out there that’s for sure!

LINK: Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage (PDF Paper)

LINK: Amazing Program Turns Sketches Into Photo Montages

PhotoSketch allows users to create photomontages from basic stick-figure sketches – you don’t even have to have any kind of artistic talent to convey your idea. As explained in the video below, the tool takes a simple sketch of the desired montage elements and pulls photographs that correspond to them from Google, Flickr and Yahoo.

The program then decides from a variety of matching results which ones work together the best and merges each disparate image element into a cohesive whole. It even matches them to the scene with the correct color tones and adds shadows as needed. The whole process takes about 15 minutes.