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, 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.