Google's DeepMind develops AI that can render 3D objects from 2D pictures

Google subsidiary DeepMind today unveiled a new type of computer vision algorithm that can generate 3D models of a scene from 2D snapshots: the Generative Query Network (GQN). The GQN, details of which were published in Science, can "imagine" and render scenes from any angle without any human supervision or training. Given just a handful of pictures of a scene -- a wallpapered room with a colored sphere on the floor, for example -- the algorithm can render opposite, unseen sides of objects and generate a 3D view from multiple vantage points, even accounting for things like lighting in shadows. It aims to replicate the way the human brain learns about its surroundings and the physical interactions between objects, and eliminate the need for AI researchers to annotate images in datasets. Most visual recognition systems require a human to label every aspect of every object in each scene in a dataset, a laborious and costly process.