Facebook highlights AI that converts 2D objects into 3D shapes

State-of-the-art machine learning algorithms can extract two-dimensional objects from photographs and render them faithfully in three dimensions. It's a technique that's applicable to augmented reality apps and robotics as well as navigation, which is why it's an acute area of research for Facebook. In a blog post today ahead of the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in Seoul, Facebook highlighted its latest advancements with respect to intelligent content-understanding. It says that together, its systems can be used to detect even complex foreground and background objects, like the legs of a chair or overlapping furniture. "[Our] research builds on recent advances in using deep learning to predict and localize objects in an image, as well as new tools and architectures for 3D shape understanding, like voxels, point clouds, and meshes," wrote Facebook researchers Georgia Gkioxari, Shubham Tulsiani, and David Novotny in a blog post.