Nvidia researchers are taking image editing to new heights with AI algorithms that can transform street images from day to night, and cat pictures into lions and tigers.

The researchers are showing off(Opens in a new window) the AI-generated images in a presentation that’ll be given at a conference this week. And the results can look pretty realistic.

For instance, the technology also managed to convert(Opens in a new window) existing street images taken in the winter, and translate them into what they might look in the summer.

The programming was smart enough to edit out the white snow in the photos, and replace it with green grass. Barren trees were changed to be full with leaves. In addition, the gloomy cloud cover has also been removed, and been switched out with a sunny white and blue sky.

Nvidia pulled off the image conversion by using a pair of generative adversarial networks or GANs, a popular AI-driven technology that computer scientists have been experimenting with.

The Nvidia researchers saw they could train the GANs to recognize certain features in the photos. For example, one GAN was trained to recognize weather conditions in the winter by studying thousands of images taken from driving videos. Meanwhile, another GAN was trained to identify summer conditions.

When coupled together, the two GANs can process a street image and alter it to fit winter or summer weather, according to Nvidia’s blog post(Opens in a new window) on the paper.

The researchers also took the same approach when translating cat images between species. The AI algorithms managed to convert house cats to tigers, lions and vice versa, all with pretty accurate results. (The researchers also did dog breeds(Opens in a new window) too.)

However, the AI-powered image alteration has its limits. The researchers noted in their paper that translating images from night to day was harder, because it required the algorithm to add new details into the photo. The AI-generated images were also lower resolution.

Nevertheless, the technology shows how the technology can easily mass produce life-like images. In October, Nvidia researchers also demonstrated AI research that can generate photo-quality human faces, all of which were fake, but built from real celebrity faces.

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