AI can now remove race photo watermarks

Would like to hear more.

It stealing, do you work for free?

these days cameras take 120 global shutter per second. millions of free mega sized pictures can be easily obtained of fred, sydney, athing, michael, etc. from thousands of volunteer contributors.

$30 for one picture is greed.

Agreed.

I always thought a better business model would to to sell all the digital images of a runner for a low amount, say $5 -$10. Let the person do the photo-editing themselves. If someone wanted to pay more for a color-corrected print, there would be that option too. I think there would be sales.

But I think that window of making money doing race-pics is over. Everyone has a smartphone, taking pictures left and right. Out on L.I., some RDs upload them for all to take for free.

I can totally imagine clearing up some simple, smaller watermarks with some AI. I mean, I did plenty of that with photoshop back in the day. But big, large watermarks that are all over the image? I'd be impressed if it could do a consistently good job at that. It's not "removing" the water mark. The water mark alters the image, data has been lost. It's trying to guess what the space behind the watermark might be. That's challenging and currently AI can't even help me do basic stuff at work.

While there are still a lot of events that have photo companies selling images, that model isn't viable for a lot of events, with or without AI on the scene. Many races that are watermarking images, offer these watermarked images for “free” – but of course nothing is free. Sometimes a single sponsor covers the cost of hiring the photo company and that sponsor will be on the watermark, but more often but more often free images are covered by the race, which pays for them with money it collected money from from participant registrations, sponsors, and in a few cases, community grants. When the watermarked image has a race logo, the hope (of course) is that participants share the images with people in their network and of those people do the event next year….which keeps registration numbers strong enough to support stuff like chip timing, finish line beer, traffic police, etc. Now, a lot of people don’t care about finish line photos or other race “perks” for that matter, let alone helping the race survive. There are other options out there like Park Runs, or you can always use AI to make a fake image of yourself doing an event that you did not run.

Watermark removal technology has been around for quite a while...Algorithmically it's very simple, relative to image processing algorithms, to idenity and remove a watermark.

The more watermarks the more time consuming but if it's just one watermark know to be in a few specific parts of the image, it is much easier. The algorithm only needs to process the grid of pixels that the watermark is known to be in.

Here in Central California, many of our races also offer free uploads of all the race photos. I don't know how much, if any, that contributes to the high cost of even a low-key 5K (typically around $50). Personally, I'd rather pay less money and get just a marked, monitored course, accurate chip timing, and a water station or two if it's longer than 10K, and do without the free photos and the usually uninspiring t-shirt.

DMCA failed decades ago. Today HS and college kids, parents, College staff, sponsors, advertisers, meet directors, etc. machine gun 10,000 pictures, pick several hundred then give them away for free. Some have water marks.

Hooray for ai! You should just ask ai to create a photo of you running a race. Why go through all the trouble of searching out your race photo when ai can just make one for you. No one cares about your race anyway.

Watermark removal is pretty standard image processing even without sophisticated AI. It just needs interpolation, which almost always suffices, enough for a lay person to not be able to tell. What simple interpolation won’t be able to do is to restore moles or birthmarks or abnormal facial features hidden by the watermark, but state-of-the-art AI can easily do that if given other pics of the runner.

We're more interested in AI tool that can edit pictures of us (younger versions of us) INTO old photos from Olympic Finals.

It would be gamechanger for our pick-up game at bars. ;-)

speak for yourself sir. as a super fast runner I am required by my sponsor to provide a race photo after every race for them to put on facebook to show how great their product is at making champions. 🏃‍♂️🏆😎

It's called theft of services and it's a crime. Let me guess, you are of the law and order party that doesn't actually care about laws that white people break. Steal some shampoo at Walgreens... off with their heads. Steal a photograpgers intellectual property... Oh well, it's on the internet...

Truly a bunch of trash h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶s̶.

i am a proponent for anarchy, i find life quite boring. Do you know The Purge film? that's something I would like to see in our society for at least 24 hours every year.

A little b**ch like you who can't afford race photos and gets his jollies by stiffing photographers, would be the first to go. All big talk and no balls! WLook at me, I just removed the watermark of my 25 minute 5K photos. I'm a rebe! Anarchy baby!

F***ing 🤡

seems like there is only one way to settle this dispute. meet me at a costco carpark on horseback for a joust off. we can give the trolley attendant £10 to referee

It's 2024 people: Unless you have agreed to let them take your picture* it's a violation of privacy and if the photographer is of a different political opinion than you (check their social media) it might be un unlawful surveillance issue on the table there too. You might get a free picture by offering to settle out of court! ;-)

*You probably have signed away all such rights in the fine print when you signed up though, it's not like organizers can afford to set up a race for people to just have fun these days.