Ever wished you were there in Summertime?

Roberto Saracco December 9, 2017 Blog 289 Views

Are you there in winter and dream of taking the photo in Summer time. No problem. AI can fix that. Credit: Nvidia Research

Did you ever wish to take a photo of a place in a different season or in a different weather? It happened to me several times.

Well, get ready for your wish to be granted: Nvidia researchers have created an Artificial Intelligence based software that can take an image, or a video, taken, filmed, in a certain season and create an image, video, fitting the season of your choice. That goes as well if you hit a rainy day and would like to have taken the shot under a nice sunshine…

Take a look at the figure and at the clip.

Notice that the software “interpret” the meaning of season. In the clip the snowy images are replaced with images without the snow, makes sense having asked for a translation into Summer, and the trees are rendered with gree foliage, as they are supposed to be in summertime.

I would have never imagined that the word “translation” could be applied to an image, “translating from Winter to Summer”. There is a tremendous processing power backing up this translation but what is really amazing is the capability to conceptualise what Summer is like and then apply in a completely unsupervised way those concept to “translate” the image.

Just another example of how AI is transforming the world of digital photography.
I can imagine that the next step will be to create an augmented reality vision of a landscape, where you can look around just like if you were there in a different season. Imagination is the limit to what can be done.