Replacing parts of images with other images.

[flametiger74]

Is there a way I can automatically replace a specific image in a project with another specified image? Similar to replacing text in a word document. i.e. I have in a picture a bunch of pictures of cats, dogs, and mice. (all the different categories of pictures are the same exact picture) Is there a way I could select the cat and make it and all it's other duplicates in the picture be replaced with the picture of a cow?

Thanks.

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Aside from cutting and pasting? No.

[flametiger74]

Oh, that's disappointing. Having something like that would be very useful. Does anyone know if there's a plug in that can do something like that?

[Neil Cassidy]

This is actually a pretty basic pattern recognition problem! Your idea is really interesting actually, I've never thought of running a "find and replace" operation on an image. I can certainly code up a plug-in that does this without much trouble. I have a couple of other things on my plate at the moment though, how soon do you need it?

[flametiger74]

The Sooner the better. Thank you so much for your help. The real reason I'm doing this is I'm the head of a band, and I need to transpose a piece of sheet music sometimes. So what I'll do is covert the PDF sheet music to a .tif and than edit the image to the appropriate musical key. The thing is it's a big pain in the butt to go through the entire thing and copy and paste, and copy and paste, etc. So this would help me a ton. Thanks again for all your help.

[Neil Cassidy]

OK, this didn't turn out as well as I had thought. I was thinking that template matching would be sufficient for finding the images to replace. Turns out that it has a pretty tough time resolving the precise location of the pattern, and it also runs very slowly. It might be possible to speed it up by working at multiple scales and pruning at the faster ones, but I'm not sure how accurate this would be.

There are other methods for doing the recognition part, but some are patented (i.e. SIFT) and most are still quite complicated.

I think I'll have to put this idea on the back burner for now, sorry about this! I have to figure some other things out before I can code up the whole thing. Time willing, I should be able to put something together eventually.