Given a satellite image, machine learning creates the view on the ground

Leonardo da Vinci famously created drawings and paintings that showed a bird's eye view of certain areas of Italy with a level of detail that was not otherwise possible until the invention of photography and flying machines. Indeed, many critics have wondered how he could have imagined these details. But now researchers are working on the inverse problem: given a satellite image of Earth's surface, what does that area look like from the ground? How clear can such an artificial image be? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Xueqing Deng and colleagues at the University of California, Merced.