Microsoft AutoCollage 2008 Slices Photos

By intelligently recognizing "regions of interest" in photos and ranking them accordingly, AutoCollage can assemble a seamless collage without any user expertise.

You wouldn’t expect much engineering effort to be poured into software for a task as simple as arranging photos into a collage, but Microsoft has taken the concept to its logical extreme with AutoCollage 2008, released Thursday. The advanced program from Microsoft Research Cambridge takes combining images to a new level of automation with object recognition, face detection, image blending, and other computer graphics wizardry.

While the products of AutoCollage look like something a Photoshop pro could cook up fairly easily, the real innovation lies in the lack of skill needed to create them. After importing seven or more photos, AutoCollage detects faces and other focal points in the pictures then seamlessly combines them into a blended collage with only a handful of user input.

“People have a lot of images,” Microsoft researcher Carsten Rother explained in a statement, “and the first goal was to ask, ‘Can we create a representation of these images as compact as possible?’” It would seem the team achieved this goal. The finished product can dice up to 30 photos into a single collage.

Microsoft offers AutoCollage 2008 as a free 30-day trial, after which point it can be purchased for $20.