For several years, developers from around the world demonstrate neural networks, which can either enhance your photos or to draw pictures from scratch. At the California conference GTC 2019 group NVIDIA Research found something truly amazing — GauGAN artificial intelligence that creates realistic landscapes based on the schematic drawings. Unlike all similar projects, the novelty is able to add shadows and reflections even from the smallest of stones and change of the seasons.

Name GauGAN chosen artificial intelligence is named after the French artist Paul Gauguin. Like many counterparts, it consists of generative-adversarial neural networks, one of which creates images, and the second decides that it is change to achieve the desired result. For training was used a base of a million landscapes, taken from Flickr.

Despite the fact that the neural network in theory able to draw even city streets, this version is designed predominantly to generate landscapes. The user can schematically draw of the mountains, lake, clouds, stones and other objects — neural network will quickly create beautiful photo with correct shadows and reflections. If you want, you can change the time of year the grass is covered with snow, and the trees lose their leaves.

It’s like a coloring book, showing the location of trees, sky and sun. The neural network is able to fill the painting with details, textures, reflections and colors based on what she saw on real images.

Brian Catanzaro, the head of research

It is noteworthy that the system does not simply copy the textures from photos, and imposes on the sketch, and synthesize completely new images. Thus, obtained results similar to the work of real artists.

Unfortunately, the neural network is not yet available to ordinary users. It is expected that GauGAN facilitate the work of developers and designers creating beautiful sketches will take less time.

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