New MIT/Google algorithm retouches photos in real time

The program is efficient enough to run on phones and is so fast that it can display retouched images in real-time, making it possible for users to see the final version of the image while still framing the shot. Researchers from Google and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory unveiled it this week at Siggraph, the premier digital graphics conference. The work builds on an earlier project from the MIT researchers that involved a similar process, but it occurred in the cloud. A phone would send a low-resolution version of an image to a web server, which would then send back a'transform recipe' that could be used to retouch the high-resolution version of the image on the phone, reducing bandwidth consumption. 'Google heard about the work I'd done on the transform recipe,' says Michaël Gharbi, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on both the original and new papers.