Neural scene representation and rendering

There is more than meets the eye when it comes to how we understand a visual scene: our brains draw on prior knowledge to reason and to make inferences that go far beyond the patterns of light that hit our retinas. For example, when entering a room for the first time, you instantly recognise the items it contains and where they are positioned. If you see three legs of a table, you will infer that there is probably a fourth leg with the same shape and colour hidden from view.

Even if you can’t see everything in the room, you’ll likely be able to sketch its layout, or imagine what it looks like from another perspective. These visual and cognitive tasks are seemingly effortless to humans, but they represent a significant challenge to our artificial systems. Today, state-of-the-art visual recognition systems are trained using large datasets of annotated images produced by humans.

Acquiring this data is a costly and time-consuming process, requiring individuals to label every aspect of every object in each scene in the dataset. As a result, often only a small subset of a scene’s overall contents is captured, which limits the artificial vision systems trained on that data. As we develop more complex machines that operate in the real world, we want them to fully understand their surroundings: where is the nearest surface to sit on?

What material is the sofa made of? Which light source is creating all the shadows? Where is the light switch likely to be?

Source: deepmind.com