Tao Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ping Tan, Ariel Shamir, and Shi-Min Hu, students at Tsinghua University and National University of Singapore created a truly amazing piece of software that transforms the outlines of a sketch you draw into an almost perfect photograph.

The web site presenting the software and allowing people to experiment with it crashed under the enormous traffic it faced. Besides the opportunity to play with the algorithm on the site, it also provided the binary code for the image filtering scheme, a PDF showing intermediate results and comparisons, and high resolution compositions and detailed statistics of the user studies in another PDF.

I guess, the next best thing to playing with the software itself is to watch a video of it in action until it is online again: