Software Combines Thousands of Online Images Into One That Represents Them All 66
Zothecula writes If you're trying to find out what the common features of tabby cats are, a Google image search will likely yield more results than you'd ever have the time or inclination to look over. New software created at the University of California, Berkeley, however, is designed to make such quests considerably easier. Known as AverageExplorer, it searches out thousands of images of a given subject, then amalgamates them into one composite "average" image.
Actual article (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link to the actual article, rather than the useless link provided:
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/08/14/average-image-for-big-visual-data/ [berkeley.edu]
The video was pretty interesting!
Re:The Average Cat (Score:5, Informative)
You may have read the article (dubitable), but you didn't watch the video or read the SIGGRAPH paper. They demonstrate a browsing tool that enables you to, for example, find an average nose nearly instantly. You can then filter the thousands or millions of images to find specific cat breeds, poses, situations, or colors in seconds.
The tool is called average explorer, and it allows a user to interactively explore a vast set of image data quickly and efficiently. The one picture you describe was a single click in the explorer.
You did the equivalent of saying "Wow, I can make a black dot on a white canvas. That's not very exciting." when presented a single click with a single tool in Photoshop.