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email thisMonday after posting the composite photo of a Heron in flight I got an email from Maneesh Agrawala, whom I met and worked (and hiked) with back at Vicinity. He's been working on software that does similar things, without all of the photoshop hackery. Check out their paper on Interactive Digital Photomontage and the video if you have the bandwidth (VLC is a free program for watching the AVI on OS X).
compositing to remove wires
A number of years back Maneesh, Christopher Stolte, and Christian Cabot created a company around techniques they had developed at Stanford for improving driving direction maps (Rendering Effective Route Maps: Improving Usability Through Generalization). Vicinity bought the technology, Microsoft bought Vicinity, MSN'ers can now get LineDrive™ driving directions, and Maneesh got his PhD.
I see that the Chris's have formed a company called Tableau which is getting favorable writeups. Maneesh continues his great work in computer imagery and visualization, now at Microsoft Research. Check out their paper on combining flash and non-flash images. I also like the Interactive Exploded View technique.
Oh, MAN! I sure wish I had this software before I manually took out the wires from this photo in Photoshop! Hours of work:
http://www.tjimaging.com/images/photos/wires-both.jpg