Just take a look at the historical photos results! That's one of the coolest things I've seen in well over a year. I've come across most of these photos before in textbooks and on the web, but this demo makes all of those historical figures and moments in time feel as real as if they were happening in the world today. It's much more pronounced than colorizing black and white photos. I feel connected.
I'm convinced that the folks that present at SIGGRAPH are capable of nothing short of black magic wizardry. I can understand the technology being used, but my visual cortex only sees the impossible becoming real.
This is truly deserving of the word awesome, because I am in awe.
Problem is, this paper won't be able to produce those results from historical photos. I find them quite misleading, to be honest.
You'll need to either use a separate 3D depth estimation AI, or (more likely) have someone do a manual stereoscopic 3D conversion of your historical image. Only then (when you have depth data) can the algorithm presented in this paper start its work.
In the meantime, I tried our Midas on other images and it failed most of the time. Really only works for those stock-is pictures with clear foreground and background and I believe it mainly just detects bokeh blur as opposed to actually understanding the scene.
Yes, you are right. Existing single-image depth estimation models are not far from perfect. We hope to see future development in that direction to further improve the visual quality of 3D photos.
I'm convinced that the folks that present at SIGGRAPH are capable of nothing short of black magic wizardry. I can understand the technology being used, but my visual cortex only sees the impossible becoming real.
This is truly deserving of the word awesome, because I am in awe.