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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 Rich on Monday August 31 2020, @11:47AM
Yup. I meant those. I don't even think they were surprising. Recent commercially available resolutions from LEO seem to be below 30 cm. The NRO will probably laugh at that, but even if that was their limit, too, they could do overlays. I just read up on it (without going too deep) and it looks like naive summing of values yields 6dB at fourfold image numbers, i.e. they'd get a 16-fold noise reduction from a burst of 256 images. They will surely have advanced algorithmic or machine learning techniques to also consider nearby pixels, phase correlation, transient separation from backgrounds, etc. to get to subpixel resolution. I'd be suprised if they could not get down to millimeter ranges. Add the stuff from the article, and it's all in nice 3D and colour.