Google AI now takes professional photos. And it does it based on Street View images
Jul 17, 2017
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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Thanks to Google Street View, we can see many corners of the world we may never even visit. Some artists even use it to create photos of remote places from their own home. Now, Google itself finds a way to produce professional-looking photos from their Street View shots. They have created Creatism, a deep-learning system that analyzes Street View scenes searching for a beautiful composition. The algorithm finds the scenes which it’s supposed to turn into shots worthy of professional photographers.
Hui Fang and Meng Zhang have published the study describing the process and the goals of the algorithm. Using their system, they try to mimic the workflow of landscape photographers “from framing for the best composition to carrying out various post-processing operations.” The algorithm also features dramatic mask, a feature that improves dramatic lighting for a photo.
According to the developers, it was a challenge measuring aesthetic value in a photograph, as it’s a really subjective concept. They have created an experiment that’s supposed to objectively measure the quality of the photos. In this experiment, they asked professional photographers to blindly rate the photos from different sources. Apparently, a part of the AI-created images was confused with professional work. You can check out the entire gallery here and see for yourself.
I must admit, for some of these photos I would never guess they were chosen, taken and processed by an algorithm. As someone who enjoys taking landscape photos, I believe this could be a useful tool for finding locations and getting ideas how to photograph them. On the other hand, it makes me feel a bit strange, considering that an algorithm can “take” a photo similar to the one I would. I’m very interested to hear your thoughts about this. Could this be game changing for landscape photographers? In a good or in a bad way?
[Creatism via DPReview; photo credits: Google Blog]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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7 responses to “Google AI now takes professional photos. And it does it based on Street View images”
I love google maps. I am always using them to scout out locations and virtualy walk through parts of this world that I am unable too! It just keeps getting better and better.
http://www.photogoffy.com
Photography is now officially dead.
No. No, it’s not.
?? why dead. becouse ome machine have a good algoritham for taking photos. same thing like iphone, was gonna replace dslr? i respect goglle , becouse it makes my scounting and planning ,for taking photos much easier. there is no machine that will replace human creativity and inviduality.
I think its continuously evolving and the more technical/automated/hi-tech it gets, the more difficult it is to be accepted by some as “photography”. The same way a writer using a computer and editing/workflow improvement with apps and programs instead of a typewriter (and god forbid a thesaurus!) doesn’t make him less of a writer. Tools are evolving and thats what this is, basically.
Not at all. There is a blandness and ubiquity in many landscape photos these days, and that is what this algorithm replicates. The more run-of-the-mill landscape shots that are published, the more the truly creative shots will stand out.
How easily things are pronounced “dead” once something new or improved arrived. Theater was supposed to be dead when movies arrived. Radio was supposed to be dead when TV arrived. Actors, model makers, matte and stop-motion artists to name a few were supposed to be dead when CGI arrived (and in Jurassic Park “extinct”). Albums were supposed to be dead when MP3 and the Internet became the norm for listening to music. Yet they aren’t. There will always be people around for creation AND innovation. If you’re throwing “dead” out there because of this, you’re just not paying attention.