Georgia Tech Faculty Papers Recognized Among the Best in SIGGRAPH History

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group in Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH) published a second volume of its Seminal Graphics Papers.

The Seminal Graphics Papers contain noteworthy papers presented at the SIGGRAPH Conference over the past 50 years. Seven current and former faculty and students from Georgia Tech had their papers republished in Seminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries, Vol. 2.

Professor Gregory Turk, who received the 2012 ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, and Distinguished Professor Irfan Essa each had two author credits in Vol. 2. Turk and Essa collaborated on the paper Graphcut Textures: Image and Video Synthesis Using Graph Cuts along with former Georgia Tech Ph.D. students Vivek Kwatra, Arno Schödl, and former faculty member Aaron Bobick. The paper was presented at the 2003 SIGGRAPH Conference.

The paper introduced a novel algorithm for image and video synthesis. It demonstrated how they could use the algorithm to merge different images to create a new scene interactively.

“As the project was developing, we discovered that hiding the seams in this way could also be used to edit together parts of separate photos, such as taking a house from one image and placing it beside a river in a second image,” Turk said. “I think that this photo editing technique was the idea that had the most lasting impact from this paper.”