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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: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 30 2020, @05:54PM (1 child)
They scan millions of people's vacation pics to do this? Where did they get all the pics? Were they hoovered off of Facebook and other social media? Maybe from Google Drive? Possibly even from people's home computers?
The question in my mind, is whether they were given legal permission to use thousands of artists work. Maybe, like the advertising companies, they just presume to have rights to people's information.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2020, @06:25PM
The pics were presumably taken from the public web for the purpose of research which falls under fair use.