You only need to go check out the latest Hollywood blockbuster or pick up a new AAA game title to be reminded that computer graphics can be used to create some dazzling otherworldly images when called for. But some of the most impressive examples of machine-generated images aren’t necessarily alien landscapes or giant monsters, they’re image modifications that we don’t even notice.
That’s the case with a new A.I. demonstration created by computer scientists in China. A collaboration between Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Beijing’s Microsoft Research lab, they’ve developed a smart artificial intelligence which can be used to accurately fill in blank areas in an image: Whether that’s a missing face or the front of a building.
Called inpainting, the technique uses deep learning technology to fill these spaces either by copying image patches on the remainder of the picture, or by generating new areas that look convincingly accurate. The tool, which is referred to by its creators as PEN-Net (Pyramid-context ENcoder Network), does this image restoration by “encoding contextual semantics from full-resolution input and decoding the learned semantic features back into images.” The resulting Attention Transfer Network (ATN) images are not only impressively realistic, but the tool is also very quick to learn.
“[In this work, we proposed] a deep generative model for high-quality image inpainting tasks,” Yanhong Zeng, a lead author on the project, who is associated with both Sun Yat-sen University’s School of Data and Computer Science and Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, told Digital Trends. “Our model fills missing regions from deep to shallow at all levels, based on a cross-layer attention mechanism, so that both structure and texture coherence can be ensured in inpainting results. We are excited to see that our model is capable of generating clearer textures and more reasonable structures than previous works.”
As Zeng notes, this isn’t the first time researchers have developed tools to carry out inpainting. However, the team’s PEN-Net system demonstrates impressive results next to classical method PatchMatch and even other state-of-the-art approaches.
“Image inpainting has a wide range of applications in our daily life,” Zeng continued. “We are now planning to apply our technology in image editing — especially for object removal [and] old photo restoration.”
A paper describing the work, titled “Learning Pyramid-Context Encoder Network for High-Quality Image Inpainting,” is available to read on preprint paper repository Arxiv.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.