Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Heung-Yeung Shum

Baining Guo

Ying-Qing Xu

Jian Qiao Sun

Richard S Szeliski

Xin Tong

Kun Zhou

Stephen S Lin

Yanyun Chen

Jiang Tao Li

Sing Bing Kang

Xiaoou Tang

Lifeng Wang

Xi Wang

Lin Liang

Bo Zhang

John Michael Snyder

Jiaping Wang

Stephen Ssu-te Lin

Weiwei Zhang

Yin Li

Jiaya Jia

Xinguo Liu

Hua Zhong

Zhengyou Zhang

Qiang Wang

Jue Wang

Bo Liu

Michael F Cohen

Ya-Qin Zhang

Gang Chen

Zhouchen Lin

Qifa Ke

Li-Yi Wei

Barn-Wan Li

Zhong Ren

Jinwei Gu

Shing-Chow Chan

Mei Han

Lei Zhang

Wei-Ying Ma

Feng Wu

Kuansan Wang

Yan Lu

Zhiwei Li

Hong Yu Chen

Ying Huang

Xin Huang

Rui Cai

Fang Wen

Lu Yuan

Bo-June Hsu

Richard Junqiang Qian

Yu-ting Kuo

Minmin Gong

Chao-Chia Liu

Long Quan

Hong-Hui Sun

Qiming Hou

Min-Sheng Wu

Ligang Liu

Jin-Xiang Chai

Jian Wang

Eric J Horvitz

Shipeng Li

Xuedong D Huang

Zicheng Liu

Lili Cheng

Xu Yang

Todd D Newman

Arun Sacheti

Li-wei He

Shuntaro Yamazaki

Peter-Pike Johannes Sloan

Hua Cai

Yi Li

Jian Sun

Yasuyuki Matsushita

Padmanabhan Anandan

Hai Tao

David P Vronay

James H Lewallen

Zhong Wu

David Shigeru Taniguchi

Lawrence William Colagiovanni

Padmananbhan Anandan

Weiwei Xu

Cornelia Carapcea

Lvdi Wang

Jin Huang

Xiaohan Shi

Yihua Xu

Jianguang Lou

Qi Ren

Yaohua Hu

Jianwei Han

Rongrong Wang

Jingdan Zhang

Ying Hua Song

Chi-Keung Tang

Multiple schemes and techniques for facilitating presentations with an interactive application are described. For example, an interactive application provides a console view overlay for integrating multiple productivity applications into a graphical user interface (GUI) window. An interactive application can also share a selected display portion of the console view overlay with other interactive applications. As another example, presenters and other audience members can draw on the selected display portion being shared, and the drawn graphics are synchronously displayed by the other interactive applications. Interactive applications, as directed by their users, can join various member groups and specific presentations thereof. Moreover, a user may share content in accordance with membership grouping.

Presentation facilitation

Described herein is a technology that facilitates efficient large-scale similarity-based retrieval. In several embodiments documents, images, and/or other multimedia files are compactly represented and efficiently indexed to enable robust search using a long-query in a large-scale corpus. As described herein, these techniques include performing decomposition of a file, e.g., an image, a document containing an image, or a document-like representation of an image. The techniques use dimension reduction to obtain three parts, low-dimensional representations (major semantics), file specific terms (minor semantics), and background words, representing the major semantics in a feature vector and the minor semantics as keywords. Using the techniques described, file vectors are matched in a topic model and the results ranked based on the keywords.

Long-query retrieval

Described is a technology by which a low-resolution image is processed into a high-resolution image, including by performing processing in the gradient domain. A gradient profile corresponding to the lower-resolution image is transform into a sharpened image gradient. A high-resolution gradient profile is estimated from a low-resolution gradient profile, e.g., by multiplying the low-resolution gradient profile by a transform ratio that is based upon learned shape parameters, learned sharpness values and a curve distance to an edge pixel along the gradient profile. The transform ratio is used to transform a low-resolution gradient field to a high-resolution gradient field. Reconstructing the higher-resolution image is performed by using the high-resolution gradient field as a gradient domain constraint, e.g., in along with a reconstruction constraint obtained from image domain data. An energy function is minimized by enforcing the gradient domain constraint and the reconstruction constraint, e.g., by performing a gradient descent algorithm.

Image super-resolution using gradient profile prior

A unified search service may collect information related to an enterprise from at least one of publicly available data and private enterprise data. In some implementations, crowd sourcing may be used to determine a source list of one or more sources of information. Authored content can be generated, such as by combining one or more items of information from the public data with one or more items of information from the private enterprise data. Further, in some implementations, a public index may be generated from the public data, and one or more affiliation indexes may be generated from the private enterprise data. For example, a first affiliation index may contain confidential enterprise information, while a second affiliation index may contain non-confidential enterprise information. A user's affiliation to the enterprise may be taken into consideration when determining which indexes to use when responding to a search request from the user.

Enterprise search over private and public data

Systems, methods and computer-storage media are provided for identifying query formulation suggestions in response to receiving a search query. A portion of a search query is received. Query formulation suggestions are identified by semantically analyzing the search query. The query formulation suggestions are used to further formulate the received search query. The query formulation suggestions include semantic-pattern-based query suggestions that are derived from semantic query patterns, one or more entities, and information associated with these entities. The query formulation suggestions are transmitted for presentation.

Interactive semantic query suggestion for content search

Systems, methods and computer-storage media are provided for identifying low-match search queries and determining comparable item matches to suggest to the user in response to a low-match query. 'Low-match queries' are queries for which an insufficient number of exact item matches are available. In embodiments, exact and/or comparable item matches may be determined via semantic analysis. Also provided are systems, methods and computer-storage media for informing the user, by way of a presented indicator, or the like, that a presented item was selected for presentation based upon a similarity metric rather than being determined an exact match for the input query.

Identifying query formulation suggestions for low-match queries

A method for creating an optimized gradient mesh of a vector-based image from a raster-based image. In one implementation, a set of boundaries for an object on a raster-based image may be received. An initial gradient mesh of the object may be created. A residual energy between the object on the raster-based image and a rendered initial gradient mesh may be minimized to generate an optimized gradient mesh.

Creating optimized gradient mesh of a vector-based image from a raster-based image

Embodiments related to the removal of blur from an image are disclosed. One disclosed embodiment provides a method of performing an iterative non-blind deconvolution of a blurred image to form an updated image. The method comprises downsampling the blurred image to form a blurred image pyramid comprising images of two or more different resolution scales, downsampling a blur kernel to form a blur kernel pyramid comprising kernels of two or more different sizes, and deconvoluting a selected image in the blurred image pyramid according to a Richardson-Lucy deconvolution process in which a bilateral range/spatial filter is employed.

Removing blur from an image

A computer implemented method for deforming a 3D polygon mesh using non-linear and linear constraints. The method includes creating a coarse control 3D polygon mesh that completely encapsulates the 3D polygon mesh to be deformed, projecting the deformation energy of the 3D polygon mesh and the constraints of the 3D polygon mesh to the vertices, or subspace, of the coarse control 3D polygon mesh, and determining the resulting deformed 3D polygon mesh by iteratively determining the deformation energy of the subspace. The constraints may be either linear or non-linear constraints, for example, a Laplacian constraint, a position constraint, a projection constraint, a skeleton constraint, or a volume constraint.

Three dimensional polygon mesh deformation using subspace energy projection

An exemplary method includes providing image data for an illuminated physical sample of a heterogeneous translucent material, determining one or more material properties of the material based in part on a diffusion equation where one of the material properties is a diffusion coefficient for diffusion of radiation in the material and where the determining includes a regularization term for the diffusion coefficient, mapping the one or more material properties to a virtual object volume, assigning virtual illumination conditions to the virtual object volume, and rendering the virtual object volume using the virtual illumination conditions as a boundary condition for a system of diffusion equations of the virtual object volume. Other methods, devices and systems are also disclosed.

Modeling and rendering of heterogeneous translucent materals using the diffusion equation

Processes and techniques for imparting three-dimensional visual characteristics to images in a two-dimensional space are described. In one implementation, a graphical image is received in a two-dimensional space (e.g., a user interface on a computing device). A shape palette is presented to a user, the shape palette comprising a visual representation of three-dimensional visual information. Based on user markup of the shape palette, three-dimensional visual information is extracted from the shape palette and correlated with the graphical image. The three-dimensional visual information is processed to render the graphical image with three-dimensional visual characteristics.

Imparting three-dimensional characteristics in a two-dimensional space

A system for identifying individuals in digital images and for providing matching digital images is provided. A set of images that include faces of known individuals is received. Faces are detected in the images and facial components are identified in each face. Visual words corresponding to the facial components are generated, stored, and associated with identifiers of the individuals. At a later time, a user may provide an image that includes the face of one of the known individuals. Visual words are determined from the face of the individual in the provided image and matched against the stored visual words. Images associated with matching visual words are ranked and presented to the user.

Scalable face image retrieval

Systems and methods provide drag-and-drop pasting for seamless image composition. In one implementation, a user casually outlines a region of a source image that contains a visual object to be pasted into a target image. An exemplary system automatically calculates a new boundary within this region, such that when pasted at this boundary, visual seams are minimized. The system applies a shortest path calculation to find the optimal pasting boundary. The best path has minimal color variation along its length, thus avoiding structure and visual objects in the target image and providing the best chance for seamlessness. Poisson image editing is applied across this optimized boundary to blend colors. When the visual object being pasted has fine structure at its border that could be truncated by the Poisson editing, the exemplary system integrates the alpha matte of the visual object into the Poisson equations to protect the fine structure.

Drag-and-drop pasting for seamless image composition

Growing community of inventors

Beijing, China

Heung-Yeung Shum