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Posts Tagged ‘Random.’

Google researchers use AI to generate 3D models from random Internet images

13 Aug

Researchers with Google Research and the Google Brain deep learning AI team have published a new study detailing Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections (NeRF). The system works by taking ‘in the wild’ unconstrained images of a particular location — tourist images of a popular attraction, for example — and using an algorithm to turn them into a dynamic, complex, high-quality 3D model.

The researchers detail their project in a new paper, explaining that their work involves adding ‘extensions’ to neural radiance fields (NeRF) that enable the AI to accurately reconstruct complex structures from unstructured images, meaning ones taken from random angles with different lighting and backgrounds.

This contrasts to NeRF without the extensions, which is only able to accurately model structures from images that were taken in controlled settings. The obvious benefit to this is that 3D models can be created using the huge number of Internet photos that already exist of these structures, transforming those collections into useful datasets.

Different views of the same model constructed from unstructured images.

The Google researchers call their more sophisticated AI ‘NeRF-W,’ one used to create ‘photorealistic, spatially consistent scene representations’ of famous landmarks from images that contain various ‘confounding factors.’ This represents a huge improvement to the AI, making it far more useful compared to a version that requires carefully controlled image collections to work.

Talking about the underlying technology, the study explains how NeRF works, stating:

‘The Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) approach implicitly models the radiance field and density of a scene within the weights of a neural network. Direct volume rendering is then used to synthesize new views, demonstrating a heretofore unprecedented level of fidelity on a range of challenging scenes.’

There’s one big problem, though, which is that NeRF systems only work well if the scene is captured in controlled settings, as mentioned. Without a set of structured images, the AI’s ability to generate models ‘degrades significantly,’ limiting its usefulness compared to other modeling approaches.

The researchers explain how they build upon this AI and advance it with new capabilities, saying in their study:

The central limitation of NeRF that we address in this work is its assumption that the world is geometrically, materially, and photometrically static — that the density and radiance of the world is constant. NeRF therefore requires that any two photographs taken at the same position and orientation must have identical pixel intensities. This assumption is severely violated in many real-world datasets, such as large-scale internet photo collections of well-known tourist landmarks…

To handle these complex scenarios, we present NeRF-W, an extension of NeRF that relaxes the latter’s strict consistency assumptions.

The process involves multiple steps, including first having NeRF-W model the per-image appearance of different elements in the photos, such as the weather, lighting, exposure level and other variables. The AI ultimately learns ‘a shared appearance representation for the entire photo collection,’ paving the way for the second step.

In the second part, NeRF-W models the overall subject of the images…

‘…as the union of shared and image-dependent elements, thereby enabling the unsupervised decomposition of scene content into static and transient components. This decomposition enables the high-fidelity synthesis of novel views of landmarks without the artifacts otherwise induced by dynamic visual content present in the input imagery.

Our approach models transient elements as a secondary volumetric radiance field combined with a data-dependent uncertainty field, with the latter capturing variable observation noise and further reducing the effect of transient objects on the static scene representation.’

Upon testing their creation, the researchers found that NeRF-W was able to produce high-fidelity models of subjects with multiple detailed viewpoints using ‘in-the-wild’ unstructured images. Despite using more complicated images with many variables, the NeRF-W models surpassed the quality of models generated by the previous top-tier NeRF systems ‘by a large margin across all considered metrics,’ according to researchers.

The potential uses for this technology are numerous, including the ability to generate 3D models of popular destinations for VR and AR applications using existing tourist images. This eliminates the need to create carefully-controlled settings for capturing the images, which can be difficult at popular destinations where people and vehicles are often present.

A PDF containing the full study can be found here; some models can be found on the project’s GitHub, as well.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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20 Random Thoughts on Google Photos in a Rambling Stream of Consciousness Format

10 Apr

Google Photos Mosaic

Not exactly beat poetry, this list is a rambling mess of 20 things that I thought about today about my experience with Google Photos.

This list is very poorly written and absolutely lacks coherence. It’s a stream of consciousness jumble of unrelated thoughts about Google Photos.

I’ve been using (and uploading to) Google Photos non-stop since it launched. I think the service holds great promise but is also flawed in some ways at the same time.

Disclaimer: these are my experiences. My experiences are probably different than yours. I likely have more photos on Google Photos than 99.999% of users, so things that may be broken for me may work perfectly for you.

Album is Empty

1. My single biggest complaint about Google Photos is how long it takes to generate shareable links to content. Being able to share a photo or album or video by creating and copying a link is a nice feature, but in my case it typically will take several minutes to several hours in order for that link to actually work. When I create a link and copy and paste it I always get: “Album is empty use the plus to add items,” when I first try to share or access that album.

Link sharing should be instantaneous (like it is on Flickr), but even if it is not it would be better for the user to get some sort of messaging saying “your album will be ready in 27 minutes, come back later” or something like that. For the first six months or so I just thought sharing by link simply did not work, now I know it’s just a delay thing.

2. Google face tagging is awesome! It’s wonderful to have my family and friends’ photos grouped by face and I love that I can go back and put their name on them. Unfortunately Google Photos would appear to limit you to 200 different people at which point the tagging functionality will no longer tag any new people. In my case Google Photos early on chose to facial tag a lot of musical acts that I photographed at Coachella leaving no space for other real friends that I wish were in there.

I’m not sure why there is such a low 200 face limit or why there should be any limit at all. At a minimum, Google Photos should let me manually tag people and then run facial recognition on these people instead of the random 200 that the software has selected.

3. I wish Google Photos had a public sharing option. Private by default is nice, but it would also be nice to be able to make some photos in the service public.

No Keywords in Google Photos
Your titles, descriptions and keywords do not get uploaded with Google Photos.

4. I wish Google Photos used all of the careful keywords and metadata that I embed in my photos. One of the nice things about Flickr is that when I add descriptive keywords to my photos in Lightroom and save them to the file Flickr automatically populates the tags along with the photo’s title and description. Google Photos ignores this data. I’m not sure why Google Photos does not care about this data as I would think it would be very useful for search and also very easy to include with uploaded photos. If Google Photos can bring in the iso and shutter speed setting with my photos, why not the keywords too?

5. Google Photos gives you a “card dismissed” message when you dismiss a card using Google Photos’ assistant. This message disappears after about 10 seconds. The problem is that if you are trying to go through a number of different Google automatic creations the page jumps as this message disappears. This makes you accidently click on the wrong place on the page all the time when trying to process more than one creation at a time. This message is not important enough to justify the instability it creates for use on the page.

6. On March 22, Google Photos announced smarter auto albums. It’s been several weeks now and I have not had a single automatic album suggested for me yet by Google Photos assistant. It would be nice to experience what these are like.

7. Since Google Photos launched I’ve found that it takes much longer to upload my photos to Google+, usually as long as 2 minutes or so to upload a photo. Not sure that this has anything to do with Google Photos.

8. Google Photos seems to do a little better job uploading photos than it did in the early days. In the early days sometimes it would only upload 50 photos for me in a single day. Now it typically will upload several hundred a day, but it’s still going to be a long time before it finishes with the 489,052 remaining in the current batch — and then I will still have many more batches to upload. By contrast Amazon Photos does not resize my RAW files at all and goes about 10x as fast.

9. Sharing very large albums with people does not work. At present Google Photos will not allow you to share over 2,000 photos at once. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to share all of the photos I’ve taken with my friend Scott Jordan with him the other day. Finally I had to give up trying and just create a new Google Account that we could both share and reupload all of the photos to that account. That was a pain and there should be a better way for people to share larger albums of photos.

10. Auto facial recognition is good but if it can’t auto tag everyone, Google Photos should let you manually tag people. A combination of automatic AI facial recognition with manual user tagging would make more complete collection.

11. When scrolling through your main Google Photos Library Google Photos will let you fast forward many years into the past. For example, it will start by showing me photos I took yesterday but then I can pull the slider all the way down and easily jump to say photos from 2010. When you are scrolling through photos of people Google Photos has facial tagged though they will not let you jump forward this way. If you have a lot of photos of someone getting to the year 2010 can take a very long time if you have to scroll through everything to get to that time.

12. Sometimes thumbnail versions of photos load very slowly on Google Photos. Other times they render quickly. Not sure why the diffference at times.

13. When I search for cats on Google Photos it brings up a lot of photos of my black labradors. If Google Photos uploaded my keywords they would probably have a better idea that it was a dog in the photo than a cat.

14. The share photos to Facebook functionality doesn’t work for me on Google Photos. Sharing Photos to Google+ seems to work just fine though.

15. Google Photos has only identified 143 “things in my photos.” I’ve collected over 2,000 albums on Flickr, many dedicated to specific things. My Flickr albums are much better organized than my Google Photos albums. Flickr allows me to build albums by my keywords though, Google Photos does not. After using the service as long as I have with as many photos as I have I feel like it should have identified more than 143 things.

16. I have to launch Google Photos and the Assistant to get it to add photos from my iPhone to Google Photos on wifi. I wish as soon as my phone connected to wifi photos from my phone just automatically uploaded to Google Photos, even without having to launch Google Photos app on my phone.

17. When you can get album sharing to work it can be a very powerful way to share photos with people. Here’s an album of all of the photos that Google Photos recognizes of my friend Robert Scoble by face. This includes both my processed and unprocessed photos so the quality is very mixed. I bet Robert hasn’t seen some of these photos.

18. I love how much infinite scrolling Google Photos uses. Paging sucks. Flickr should take notice of how much better Google Photos does infinite scrolling.

19. I wish there was a way I could see how many photos I’ve uploaded to Google Photos. Actually there is a way. Thanks Thomas O’Brien. So far I’ve uploaded 748,892 photos to Google Photos.

20. I wish in the share menu for Google Photos there was embed code where you could embed the photo on your blog or somewhere else on the web.


Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

 
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45 Random Thoughts on Flickr in a Rambling Stream of Consciousness Format

01 Apr

Not exactly beat poetry, this list is a rambling mess of 45 things that I thought about tonight about my favorite photo sharing site Flickr. This list is very poorly written and absolutely lacks coherence. It’s a stream of consciousness jumble of unrelated thoughts about Flickr.

There is no order or rhyme or reason behind any of these thoughts. These are just my thoughts as a heavy user who uses the site every day.

1. Flickr could be the most successful stock photography site in the world. They could be bigger than Getty Images and could become the leader of a multi billion dollar industry.

2. On the Flickr mobile app, comments specifically take too long to load.

3. Yahoo requiring phone numbers to create accounts (and by extension Flickr) greatly reduces the amount of harassment and trolling that takes place on Flickr. This is a positive thing.

4. On the Flickr mobile app you eventually run out of your contacts’ photos. There should be no reason to run out. When people run out and it defaults to a repetitive staple of Flickr promoted photos this encourages the user to close the app and go to another social network. Flickr should strive to keep users in their app for as long as possible.

5. While the “connect” splash page in the mobile app encouraging users to try to hook up their Facebook and Twitter friends in Flickr is likely a good thing, after you have seen this splash screen 500 times it’s just wasting real estate. Flickr should limit the number of times it shows this screen to users or allow users to dismiss it after say 60, 70, 300 times it’s shown and no action is taken.

If you actually click on the “Facebook” button on the connect screen and follow it through, it is the most convoluted mess I’ve ever seen in a mobile app and asks for Facebook verifications, SMS, and all kinds of other things that no user would actually go through.

6. On the Flickr mobile app you can double tap to favorite a photo. Frequently I will accidentally tap the photo once and an unwanted larger version of the photo appears. Instagram does not have this problem. Might there be another gesture to open larger photos or an option for advanced users to disable one click photo opening?

7. Groups were where the magic happened in the early days of Flickr and the conversations that took place in the discussion forums were powerful social lubricant. By diminishing the discussion functionality of Groups, Flickr hurt social on Flickr. Groups can and should be rebuilt and represent Flickr’s greatest possible potential in social. The rebuild should focus on social and conversations over pool photos.

8. Flickr allows you to view your contacts’ photos by contacts and friends and family. More customization here would be helpful. Google+ failed but their idea for circles was interesting. Allowing advanced users the ability to create more than two buckets would be a wonderful power user feature.

9. Sometimes users will change the “date uploaded” on their photos to make their photos appear more often in their followers photos from contacts page. This can be annoying as a consumer of photography, but I get it, they want more views on their photos.

10. Flickr still needs strong block functionality. Facebook has done a much better job here and should be studied. If I block someone or someone blocks me Flickr should do everything in it’s power to make sure that we are entirely invisible to each other. This should include making comments invisible from someone you are blocking in all areas of the site, including the help forum and groups especially. When you block someone their photos should not appear in your search results on Flickr.

11. When you block someone their existing comments will be removed from your photos. This should happen faster than it happens at present.

12. My single personal biggest complaint with Flickr today has to do with the photos from my contacts page. As the page adds photo it jumps around. Very often exactly as I’m going to favorite a photo the entire page will jump and I will accidentally open a photo that I did not mean to open. This page should remain static and in place as new photos are loaded.

13. Collections and Profiles should both be included under the “You” menu at the top of the Flickr page.

14. Explore is interesting but it would be more interesting if there were two versions. One for general Flickr and one specifically for the people that you are following.

15. Flickr needs a better way for Flckrmail to work on mobile.

16. The non-app mobile site for flickr m.flickr.com is very slow. Chrome users frequently have to use “request desktop site” to use the web version of Flickr on mobile.

17. Publicly designating Flickr “Pro” accounts as well as prominently showing the date someone joined the site are very helpful tools. It allows users a good way to gauge authenticity of accounts.

18. I never use any of the camera or editing functionality of the flickr mobile app.

19. Flickr is currently the best site on the internet for photo sharing for more serious photographers.

20. On the Flickr photo page there is a “date taken” field. This field should link to the archive view of that date for the photographer in question.

21. I love using SuprSetr for managing my albums on Flickr. I don’t know why when using SuprSetr Flickr’s API limits me to 4,500 photos in an album.

22. Personal interestingness scores seem to have deteriorated over time on Flickr. There especially seems to be given preference for more recent photos, but overall it feels like it’s heavily discounting the value of favorites, comments and other social data. The result is that when using the Flickr API to sort a SuprSetr album by interestingness, it is not really in the best order.

23. Similarly with search on Flickr when you search and rank by interestingness. A photo with 1 favorite should not appear ahead of a photo with 100 favorites.

24. The “albums” page for Flickr users should not have any paging at all, it should infinite scroll forever.

25. Recent Activity is the most important page on Flickr. It is so well done and the ability to filter it by different types of activity is very powerful.

26. I wish Flickr had so much more infinite scroll than it does. While iterating on designs over the past few years there was a point when it had more than it has today. If I had it my way I’d never have to page on Flickr for anything ever.

27. Stats are awesome and worth the price of Pro alone.

28. When looking at your Flickr contacts’ photos if your mouse is over a photo and you press the F key on the keyboard it should favorite that photo.

29. I miss notes in Flickr.

30. In most areas of Flickr they use an empty star for an unfavorited photo and a full white star for a favorited photo — except on the photos from your contacts page where a full white star means the photos is unfavorites and a pink star means the photos if favorited. Flickr should be more consistent. On the photos from your contacts’ page it should be changed to match the format with the rest of the site.

31. When you hover over a tag on Flickr it should tell you who added that tag. Flickr used to do this.

32. Flickr should show more than 6 albums on the main photo page without a user having to click on “show more albums.”

33. I love the fact that flickr uses AI to auto tag my photos with tags that I forgot.

34. Sometimes I feel like I’m interacting with photos from people on Flickr that are just autoposts from their instagram accounts and that these people do not really interact on Flickr. Instagram auto posts to flickr diminish the authenticity of the flickr experience and are much less valuable than organic posts to flickr.

35. Interestingly enough my own personal Instagram to Flickr functionality has been completely broken for about a year. Probably Instagram’s fault though.

36. Sometimes if I put 16 photos in the uploader form to upload some of the photos immediately generate a thumbnail while others might take several minutes to generate a thumbnail. I’m not sure why this is and feel like all photos should generate a thumbnail immediately.

37. It is a very cool thing that Flickr has figured out a way for both regular content and adult oriented content to exist on the same site.

38. I wish there were a way for flickr to identify photos that have signatures, watermarks or borders and then give me an option to eliminate those photos from my search results.

39. Flickr is an amazing tool to find things to photograph if you are going to be visiting some place new. It’s my number one “go to” place for researching things to photograph ahead of any trip that I embark on.

40. I’d love to see “suggested” facial tags for my flickr photo stream that would go into a holding bin for my approval and private photo facial recognition along the lines of what Google Photos offers today, grouping people into private albums.

41. Yahoo Image search should rely much more heavily on Flickr than it does. Flickr has the largest, high quality, highly organized collection of images on the internet today. Yahoo image search should strive to send traffic to Flickr photos over other photos on the web and should weight Flickr images and Flickr tagged images (and especially highly rated interestingness images) very high in their image and web search results.

42. It’s harder for me to blog flickr images on my blog than it used to be. The html doesn’t render right. Having the old code was cleaner.

43. I should be able to have an easy option to exclude certain flickr users from my search results when searching for images on Flickr. This is different than a block, I should just be able to easily exclude a list of users from my search results.

44. With regards to search results there are two different thumbnail views I can select. I wish I had a third that was just a bit bigger and more consistent with the size of photos on the “photos from my contacts’” page.

45. I always visit the Flickr page of anyone who adds me as a contact on Flickr. If I like what I see I add them back. If their photos have signatures, watermarks, or are largely commercial related images I never add them back.


Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

 
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Random fun times playing WoW in 3d

23 Dec

I was having a hard time finding any footage of World of Warcraft using nvidia’s anaglyph 3d drivers so I decided to take a bunch of screenshots of it myself for your viewing pleasure. This is in anaglyph 3d which requires a pair of red and cyan(red/blue) 3d glasses. They have been around for many decades now and shouldn’t be too hard to find. Some big dealers online such as amazon carry them for order. This video is best viewed in 1080p, however it will look great on any screen. I recommend sitting as close to the monitor as you can. If anyone has any questions and/or Requests for screenshots to be taken, I would be happy to do those for you. This will not be the last but only the beginning of the 3d warcraft video’s I upload so please check back soon! You can contact me at warcraftin3d@hotmail.com Enjoy!
Video Rating: 4 / 5

 
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Random. A Photography Showcase. Part 1 of PLAY on a Nikon D300

28 Aug

…now what shall I shoot next???.. a series of works named “Play” by wahliao.com www.wahliao.com A photographic journal of Singapore as seen by lifestyle photographer, Wong Kin Leong, on 10 Shot entirely on a Nikon D300 with a 10.5mm f2.8 DX fisheye lens, this series was inspired by the randomness and chaos of life and its journeys. This video, together with “Colourful” www.youtube.com is a collection of videos that showcase Singapore and its people. Random starts off as Kin Leong leaves the house, and starts a journey of randomness, photographing anything that takes his fancy. The choice of a wide angle fisheye lens for this series is carefully chosen to reflect the cosmopolitan nature of Singapore as the fisheye perspective seems to capture the wide expanse of the country to easily incorporate with ease all foreigners into the country and catering to the needs of the international community at large. Random deals with Singaporeans and their lives, being an entity of a larger community and their intimate mingling with each other on a random chaotic stage, meeting friends, transit through the city, struggling to make it through the day at the workplace, strangers whom they meet on the streets and then end back at home to be with their loved ones.

 
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