AI programme rubs flaws off photos but doesn't know what clean images look like

American visual computing company Nvidia, along with researchers from Aalto University and MIT, have come up with an artificial intelligence (AI) program that removes defects from images such as grain, text and watermarks, without studying how clean photos look like. "Our AI program shows significant benefits that can be reaped by removing the need for potentially strenuous collection of clean data (images)," the team said. The AI program is expected to find use in the medical field to eliminate extensive post-processing that is deployed to remove noise from MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) images. "There are several real-world situations where obtaining clean training data are difficult: Low-light photography (for example, astronomical imaging) and MRI," the team said. Previously, a neural network could cut out noise from images only after being trained on example pairs of unclean and clean images.