SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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.