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YEDA Research and Development Company LTD., the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of
Science, today announced it has entered into a license agreement with Adobe Systems Incorporated
related to a bidirectional similarity measure to summarize visual data.
The bidirectional similarity method developed by Prof. Michal Irani and Drs. Denis Simakov,
Yaron Caspi and Eli Shechtman of the Institute’s Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
Department is a technique for summarizing visual data – both still images and video. Rather than
cropping or scaling down an image to obtain a smaller thumbnail, or clipping a video segment, the
method produces a complete and coherent visual summary: a smaller or shorter version of the original
that retains the most relevant information. The bi-directionality of the method ensures that the resulting
image is visually coherent: In addition to telling the same “story,” it is as visually pleasing as the
original. As opposed to cropping or clipping, in which important information can be lost; or scaling
down, in which resolution is lost, summarizing manages to maintain both relevant information and
resolution details, despite the decrease in size.
The method is based on eliminating redundant information from the image/video. Video
summarization works in a similar way, only the program exploits redundancy in space-time. Gradual
resizing and rechecking ensures that the final result is seamless and coherent.
In addition to summarizing images and videos, the method may have a number of other
applications, including completing missing parts in images/videos; creating montages out of separate
images; photo reshuffling (in which elements may be moved around the image/video); automatic
cropping; image synthesis (in which an image might be expanded, rather than summarized); and image
morphing (generating a video sequence displaying a smooth transition from one image to another,
possibly unrelated, image).
Prof. Michal Irani’s research is supported by the Citi Foundation.
Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd. is the Technology Transfer Company of the Weizmann
Institute of Science. Yeda markets and commercializes intellectual property created in the Weizmann Institute laboratories.