BACKGROUND

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Sketch2Photo is an eye-catching piece of software at the intersection of graphics and computer vision. The idea is to build a photo-realistic image montage from a user-drawn computer sketch.  Here's a summary graphic from the original project:

This software was conceived and built originally by students and faculty at Tsingua University in Beijing as well as collaborators in Singapore.  The software has since been commercialized by a Japanese company and social networking site Qiao. See the original project website for more info or the citation at the end of this page.

The authors make the software available for use, something that is always valuable for academic research.  Unfortunately, they've partnered with a Japanese social networking site to release the code, so in order to use it you must sign up for that site (which is all in Japanese).  Here I document in English the steps I used to obtain the Windows installer file (extension: ".msi") by signing up for Qiao.


STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS

1) Go to http://www.qiao.ne.jp/sketch2photo_top.html. 

This is the splash page for signing up for the social network. Click the first link at the bottom of the page (black arrow).

2) You should a form asking for email address and CAPTCHA solution.  Fill these in and hit ENTER.  The site will email an activation link to your email address.  The link will start with: https://www.qiao.ne.jp/opAuthMailAddress/register/...

Go open that email and click on the link.

3) You'll now view a classic website signup form that looks like this. 

To view it in English, use the drop-down box on the upper right. Just fill it out as you like and click "Register".

4) If all goes well, your registration is now complete. Return to the original page (shown in Step 1) and click the second link at the bottom (red arrow in the diagram in Step 1), which takes you to the sign-in page.

5) Use the username and password from Step 3 to sign in to the Qiao network.  After signing in, you'll be directed to a profile page much like Facebook:

Click the "Download" link on the right side of the yellow horizontal navigation bar (circled in black above).

6) You'll now see a page with a Sketch2Photo download link (circled).  Click it and install on your Windows computer. 

CITATION

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage

Tao Chen¹  Ming-Ming Cheng¹  Ping Tan²  Ariel Shamir³  Shi-Min Hu¹

¹TNList, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University
²National University of Singapore    ³The Interdisciplinary Center

Tao Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ping Tan, Ariel Shamir, Shi-Min Hu. Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage. ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009, ACM Transactions on Graphics, to appear