A smart-phone app removes unwanted objects from digital images

Consumer Reports News: February 14, 2012 11:08 AM

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Maybe this is all too familiar: Vacation pictures taken on your smart phone that show loved ones at memorable landmarks surrounded by harried pedestrians, blurry vehicle traffic, or other unwanted objects. Soon, a simple smart-phone app will help clarify your cluttered snapshots.

Scalado, a softwaker maker in Lund, Sweden, plans on releasing an app called (aptly enough) Remove. Once installed on a smart phone, the app seamlessly captures several images with a single press of the phone's shutter button. The software then analyzes all the photos for objects that change between images—say, bystanders that move from one edge of a frame to the other. It will then build a single composite image that has removed all the unwanted objects. Other objects—cars and crowds in the background, for example—identified by the software can also be manually removed from the image with a touch on the smart phone's screen

The bloggers at Engadget had the opportunity to test a prototype of the Remove app on a pair of Android-powered smart phones. They report:

While we experienced occasional issues with the responsiveness of the UI [user interface] and noticed a couple [of] minors bugs, the app is relatively intuitive and works rather well for a prototype.

Scalado hopes to show off the Remove prototype at the 2012 Mobile World Congress, an international trade show to be conducted in Barcelona, Spain from Feb. 27 through March 1.

Pricing and availability for the final version of the Remove app hasn't been yet disclosed.

Video: Scalado (via YouTube)