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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 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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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]