Day: June 19, 2020

https://www.engadget.com/ai-recreates-painting-techniques-of-famous-artists-022923128.html

You can’t go back in time to see how Monet or Van Gogh made their masterpieces, but AI might give you the next best thing. MIT CSAIL researchers have created a machine learning system, Timecraft, that can deduce how a painting was produced and recreate the likely brushstrokes, even for famous artists. The design was first trained on 200 timelapse videos of digital and watercolor paintings, after which the scientists produced a convolutional neural network to ‘deconstruct’ artwork based on what it had learned.

The results aren’t perfect, but they’re more effective than you might think. Timecraft was better than existing benchmark tests over 90 percent of the time. And when used to recreate paintings that already have timelapse videos, it fooled almost half of the people participating in an online survey.

The source code will be available if you’re willing and able to try it yourself, or to build upon the work. Apart from the virtual history lessons, this could be useful for illustrating general painting techniques to relative newcomers — say, starting from the background and working ‘closer’ to the viewer. It may be a long while before an AI becomes the next Bob Ross, but it’s not a far-fetched idea after this.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

June 18, 2020 at 09:33PM

https://www.engadget.com/facebook-acquires-google-street-view-competitor-mapillary-092257261.html

Facebook has done a fair bit with maps in recent times — last year it opened up its AI tool to OpenStreetMap users and announced its plans to recreate an AR planet based on a 3D map of the world. More recently, it’s deployed an interactive map to keep users up-to-date with the spread of COVID-19. Now, it’s acquired Google Street View alternative Mapillary.

Mapillary is a street-level imagery platform that scales and automates mapping. Since 2013, users from some 190 countries have been collecting photos of their neighborhoods using smartphones, with Mapillary’s software stitching them all together to create immersive street-level views. It’s basically a crowd-sourced Google Street View.

Until now, all the imagery on Mapillary has been free to use for anyone for non-commercial purposes, but starting today, it will be free for commercial users as well, which gives us a clue as to how Facebook could include the service on its platform — you can probably expect street shots of businesses on their Facebook pages soon. The acquisition helps to push forward Facebook’s general map-based ambitions, too.

As mentioned, Mapillary is Google Street View’s biggest competitor and has attracted the attention of other major tech companies in its time — Amazon showed keen interest a few years back. Alternatives such as Apple Maps and Bing Maps have tried (and arguably failed) to contend with Google’s offering, but with Facebook at the helm Mapillary could well be the one to take it on seriously.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

June 19, 2020 at 04:27AM