Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Yin Li

Jian Qiao Sun

Heung-Yeung Shum

Mei Ling Wilson

Sang Kun Choe

Christian Palmer Larson

Sing Bing Kang

Ying Li

Li Erran Li

Zheng Chen

Xiaoou Tang

Benyu Zhang

Hua-Jun Zeng

Daniel B Cook

Ying-Qing Xu

Tarek Najm

Charles W Parker

Shuntaro Yamazaki

Weiwei Zhang

Sathyanarayanan Karivaradaswamy

Fabin Shen

Douglas Charles Shimonek

William M Hsu

Aleksey S Kabanov

Charles Bissonnette

Trevor Baron

Shuzhen Nong

Eric Picard

Michael J Ruete

Dean Carignan

Michael Hurt

Jian Sun

Sang Choe

Described are examples for providing stream augmenting components. A stream augmenting component having an augmentation function indicating a plurality of interfaces to one or more devices and an output stream can be initialized. At least a portion of the plurality of interfaces for the one or more devices can be accessed to at least one of obtain stream output from the one or more devices or control the one or more devices. A plurality of stream outputs from the one or more devices can be virtualized to the output stream at least in part by modifying or correlating data received over the plurality of stream outputs. The stream augmenting component can output the output stream to one or more other stream augmenting components or applications via at least another portion of the one or more interfaces.

Pluggable components for augmenting device streams

Described are examples for providing stream augmenting components. A stream augmenting component having an augmentation function indicating a plurality of interfaces to one or more devices and an output stream can be initialized. One or more functions for the one or more devices to at least one of obtain stream output from the one or more devices or control the one or more devices can be accessed. A plurality of stream outputs from the one or more devices can be virtualized to the output stream at least in part by modifying or correlating data received over the plurality of stream outputs. The output stream can be output to one or more other stream augmenting components or applications.

Described are examples for outputting stream data from a plurality of stream sources. A first data stream output for a first stream source and a second data stream output for a second stream source can be received. First data of the first data stream output can be correlated, in time, with second data of the second data stream output. One or more output frames can be output including the first data and the second data as correlated in time.

Temporally correlating multiple device streams

Technology related to virtualizing sensors is disclosed. In one example of the disclosed technology, a method can be used to allocate resources of a computing system. The method can include enumerating hardware sensors and software modules that are capable of interacting with one another. A topology can be negotiated that is compatible with capabilities of the enumerated hardware sensors and software modules. A first request can be received from a first requestor to configure at least one of the enumerated hardware sensors and software modules. The at least one of the enumerated hardware sensors and software modules can be configured in response to the received first request.

Virtualizing sensors

According to embodiments of the invention, an advertisement-generation system generates image-containing advertisements. The advertisement-generation system includes: at least one feature-selection guideline that specifies at least one recommended feature for image-containing advertisements based on advertiser inputs that specify at least one of advertisement-target-audience information, cost information, and advertiser-industry information; an image-clip library from which images are selected for inclusion in the image-containing advertisements; and at least one advertisement template that is based on the at least one feature-selection guideline; wherein the system automatically generates image-containing advertisements that contain one or more suggested colors that are automatically suggested based on one or more colors present on a web page that will host the image-containing advertisement.

Generation of contextual image-containing advertisements

Image editing tools are commonly used to assist with manipulating and saving visual compositions. Many image editing tools provide slicing functionality to create images slices (sub-images) of the visual composition. As provided herein, a slice representation of a visual composition is defined by an arbitrarily chosen set of coordinates within the visual composition. This slice region may be defined independent of other slice regions (e.g. the slice region may or may not overlap, abut, etc. other slice regions). The slice representation comprises the slice region and one or more objects or portions thereof within the slice region. Slice representations may also comprise overlapping objects and/or slice region coordinates. Objects may be manipulated within a slice representation without affecting that object within other slice representations.

Method for overlapping visual slices

Foreground object matting uses flash/no-flash images pairs to obtain a flash-only image. A trimap is obtained from the flash-only image. A joint Bayesian algorithm uses the flash-only image, the trimap and one of the image of the scene taken without the flash or the image of the scene taken with the flash to generate a high quality matte that can be used to extract the foreground from the background.

Object matting using flash and no-flash images

Virtual views of a complex scene are produced for a user to view. The virtual views are substantially free from aliasing even when using a relatively sparse set of images of the scene. In a described implementation, a scene is split into one or more coherent layers. The boundaries of the coherent layers are propagated across a plurality of frames corresponding to the scene. The splitting may be further refined (e.g., in accordance with user feedback) to present a virtual view of the scene.

Pop-up light field

A system that provides binds or associates a clickable hyperlink with an object that appears in a video stream. The hyperlink may be sent in a separate stream from the video stream, and user interfaces are provided to a user to activate the hyperlink. Activation of the hyperlink may cause a redirection to an associated website. Furthermore, feedback may be provided as to the user's activity regarding interest and activation regarding particular hyperlinks in the video.

Clickable video hyperlink

Video object cutting and pasting is described. In one implementation, pre-segmentation of video frames into regions is performed prior to a 3-D graph cut segmentation. The 3-D graph cut segmentation uses temporal coherence and a global color model to achieve accuracy of video object boundaries. A 2-D local graph cut segmentation can then be used to refine the boundaries. The boundaries can be tracked within a user-selected sequence of windows and refined using a local color model.

Separating a video object from a background of a video sequence

The present symmetric stereo matching technique provides a method for iteratively estimating a minimum energy for occlusion and disparity using belief propagation. The minimum energy is based on an energy minimization framework in which a visibility constraint is embedded. By embedding the visibility constraint, the present symmetric stereo matching technique treats both images equally, instead of treating one as a reference image. The visibility constraint ensures that occlusion in one view and the disparity in another view are consistent.

Symmetric stereo model for handling occlusion

Growing community of inventors

Redmond, WA, United States of America

Yin Li