[13:40 Sun,16.October 2022 by Thomas Richter] |
A team of researchers from Google Research at Cornell University and UC Berkeley have unveiled a new AI called InfiniteNature-Zero that allows photos of natural landscapes to come to life through virtual camera movement. Using a combination of inpainting, outpainting and super-resolution techniques, the new AI algorithm produces a quasi-infinite landscape flight shot - starting from just a single given photo. The resulting video simulates a flight motion and gives the impression of a drone flight over a natural landscape by constantly zooming or morphing. The viewer can even interactively change the direction of the flight live.
The quality of the videos is not yet very high and the resolution is only 512 x 512 pixels, but as always with such research, a new method is first demonstrated in principle before attention is then given to higher quality results. ;) Interestingly, the InfiniteNature-Zero AI was not trained using real flight photos but only using single photos of landscapes (no photo series) without any further data like camera position or orientation. The previous version still required video footage filmed by drones for training. ;) To produce the virtual flight shots, several individual problems had to be solved: image information must be added that does not appear in the original initial image, such as hidden areas in a photograph, but which then become visible when the camera moves. For example, a location hidden behind trees must be generated. This can be done by "inpainting," a method also offered by image-generating AIs such as  Stable Diffusion. The AI produces a likely image content for the previously occluded location based on the imagery it learns. To create the effect of flying, the AI must also generate image content that is outside the boundaries of the photo. This is called "outpainting" and, again, the AI must suitably generate missing image information via Deep Learning based on the original photo. Since virtual zooming into the photo also increases blurriness and image content appeared pixelated, the image is additionally sharpened afterwards via AI super-resolution. The following video from 2 Minute Papers also shows how much better the new method is than older versions:  more infos at bei infinite-nature-zero.github.iodeutsche Version dieser Seite: Mit neuer Google KI in Photos von Landschaften hineinfliegen |
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