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This AI Creates Detailed 3D Renderings from Thousands of Tourist Photos
A team of researchers at Google have come up with a technique that can combine thousands of tourist photos into detailed 3D renderings that take you inside a scene... even if the original photos used vary wildly in terms of lighting or include other problematic elements like people or cars.
The tech is called "NeRF in the Wild" or "NeRF-W" because it takes Google Brain's Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) technology and applies it to "unstructured and uncontrolled photo collections" like the thousands of tourist photos used to create the demo you see below[1][2], and the samples in the video above[3].
It's basically an advanced, neural network-driven interpolation that manages to include geometric info about the scene while removing 'transient occluders' like people or cars and smoothing out changes in lighting.
[1] demo1.gif (36.75 MiB)
[2] demo2.gif (35.66 MiB)
[3] YouTube video (3m42s).
NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections (arXiv:2008.02268v2 [cs.CV])
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:11PM (8 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:39PM (3 children)
It has to be easy enough for newsrooms to use it. Like Adobe Photoshop with machine learning tools and filters [medium.com] on ARM Macs accelerated by the "Neural Engine" [wikipedia.org].
News sites can also just grab images off Twitter and run those. The sophistication of fake images should go way up. Great new machine learning algorithms are coming out frequently, and consumer GPU performance will double/triple within a few years, with three-way competition (Intel) possibly driving down costs.
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday August 30 2020, @09:55PM (2 children)
Something doesn't quite add up with stories of this sort. We're treated to a constant stream of stories that AI can do all these amazing things with photos, like reconstruct the scene from a different angle, fix all kinds of problems such as blur and color degradation, colorize, intelligently depixelate, and most of all, identify faces, and make "deep fakes".
Then you run the GIMP (I have never used PhotoShop in large part because it is commercial), and what do you see? Certainly not any AI engine. To fix color problems in old photos there is "white balance", which is a very good if totally brain dead method of restoring colors to something close to their original values. All it does is search for the brightest red, green, and blue values, assumes those were originally part of a white object, and adjusts the values to make that color white, proportionally adjusting all the other values. Nice, but no real intelligence to that. Doesn't work on dark pictures that don't have some combination of brightly colored items that add up to white. Often there is something white in the picture-- clothes, clouds, or walls, usually.
To fix blur is a lot harder. I did read of one way to use the GIMP to fix motion blur, if the motion is in a straight line. Doesn't work if the motion follows a curve, but only because the GIMP doesn't have any way to motion blur along a path other than a straight line. (What you do is motion blur in the direction of the blur. Fight blur with blur. It works, but not without causing another problem. Sharpened an old blurry photo extremely well, but it also created terrible shadows.) I admit I am not skilled in this area. For instance, I don't understand "convolution". The GIMP's interface just gives you a 5x5 matrix to fill in.
Searching online for deblurring, there are a bunch of commercial offerings, and they do their utmost to drown out whatever libre software there may be. It's hard to tell how good these commercial offering are, really. Can't believe the vendors. They have certainly cherry-picked their examples and exaggerated their quality and effectiveness. So I am unsure what the state of the art is on deblurring.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2020, @10:44PM
I mention Photoshop because that's what "real people" use, and I know that there is at the very least an "object selection tool" [theverge.com] (see also [engadget.com]). Blender can use tensor cores for denoised ray tracing [blender.org], and maybe some video editing software [nvidia.com] can use them. Dedicated non-GPU AI/ML accelerators will be in every ARM-based Mac desktop, and similar capabilities should be usable on consumer x86 PCs via the GPU.
The disconnect between the AI stories and what you see is because the cool new stuff [youtube.com] comes out on places like GitHub + arXiv. It took a while for the concept of "deep fakes" to go from research papers to user-friendly software. But people are making "deep fake memes" these days.
As a fellow GIMP user, I already expect it to be years behind the competition. Maybe it is catching up since the competition is running out of features to add.
This AI Removes Shadows From Your Photos! 🌒 [youtube.com]
I see no reason why that shouldn't be a function in Photoshop within 5 years.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2020, @11:23PM
> Something doesn't quite add up with stories of this sort.
> Then you run the GIMP
Not to knock GIMP but I think you answered your own question.
> I don't understand "convolution". The GIMP's interface just gives you a 5x5 matrix to fill in.
Convolution is literally just matrix multiplication. [gimp.org]
> So I am unsure what the state of the art is on deblurring.
HQ predictive optical flow is some way off. [catalyzex.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Sunday August 30 2020, @02:03PM
Most probably we have passed this point already. The solution, however, exists. It is trusted computing, techniques AKA DRM. The best of both worlds is possible and the discussions needs to point out the different aspects (making trust in digital media possible and restricting access) if DRM is to be fought off.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday August 30 2020, @08:18PM (1 child)
That's been true ever since "framing a photo" was developed. Say f decades ago. Possibly earlier, but that's the first time I saw a news team select shots so that they conveyed an intended message rather than what was going on.
If you've ever been on-site at a news scene, and then seen it on TV, you've probably seen what I mean in action. They take one small part of what's going on and focus on it, excluding anything contrary to the message they intend to communicate. I've seen major fires turned into city-wide conflagrations. I've seen minor altercations turned into a major riot. Technically what they showed was actually happening, but the context was a lie.
When I was in college I thought I could read a newspaper story and figure out what was really happening. After I was on-site at a couple of stories I stopped believing that.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday August 30 2020, @09:58PM
Yes, the few times a story ran about something I knew personally, it was shocking just how much they'd distorted the facts to make it all a lot, lot more dramatic.
(Score: 1) by jurov on Monday August 31 2020, @12:44AM
But this doesn't depend on technology, photos were retouched since forever... you haven't heard about Stalin?