How to remove reflections from photographs? Here is how

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I was at this conference dinner in a fancy restaurant and the view from the restaurant window was amazing. I flipped out my cell phone and clicked a few shots expecting to capture an award winning photo but damn!! the window, reflection reflection every where; and the lights outside the restaurant made it worse. A lot of us are faced with such situations where we click pics through a window. Professional photographers use extravagant techniques like wrapping their camera lens with a dark cloth and all other mumbo-jumbo but the common folk lacks such sophistication and ends up capturing a sub standard memoir of their good times. These reflections are difficult to remove even by a photoshop expert. Keeping in mind all these problems, researchers at MIT have developed an algorithm to remove these reflections. Now, when will this algorithm be included in commercially available photo editing packages is a matter of speculation for us but it should happen soon enough owing to the techniques usefulness. 

Here is the link for the original article published on the MIT News website and those of you who are interested in understanding how this reflection removal works check out the following original research articles by the lead researcher.

• Article 1 (free access)
• Article 2 (IEEE Xplore access required)

Decisive Breakthrough Achieved in Quantum Computing

Scientists at IBM have reportedly achieved an important breakthrough in the development of quantum computer. For long it has been widely known that Moore's Law would eventually fail and scientists have been working on systems to further improve computing speed. This is were the importance of quantum computers is realized. Quantum computers would rapidly speed up processing time and would be immensely useful in extracting meaningful information for a large heap of data.

Today's computer understand information in the form of bits. A bit can have only two values '1' or '0', i.e. 'on' or 'off' state. Now, bit in a quantum computer is called quantum bit or 'qubit'; this qubit can have values '1', '0' or both 1 & 0 at the same time. This condition of having both states at the same time is called superposition and is represented by '0+1'. The sign in superposition is important as 0 & 1 have a phase relationship. Superposition is what makes quantum computers faster than today's computers.

More about this can be read at the original article posted on 'phys.org'.