ICG JKU Linz Lab Talk: 'The Revolution of Neural Rendering', Matthias Nießner

In this talk, I will present our research vision in how to create a photo-realistic digital replica of the real world, and how to make holograms become a reality. Eventually, I would like to see photos and videos evolve to become interactive, holographic content indistinguishable from the real world. Imagine taking such 3D photos to share with friends, family, or social media; the ability to fully record historical moments for future generations; or to provide content for upcoming augmented and virtual reality applications. AI-based approaches, such as generative neural networks, are becoming more and more popular in this context since they have the potential to transform existing image synthesis pipelines. I will specifically talk about an avenue towards neural rendering where we can retain the full control of a traditional graphics pipeline but at the same time exploit modern capabilities of deep learning, such as handling the imperfections of content from commodity 3D scans. While the capture and photo-realistic synthesis of imagery open up unbelievable possibilities for applications ranging from entertainment to communication industries, there are also important ethical considerations that must be kept in mind. Specifically, in the content of fabricated news (e.g., fake-news), it is critical to highlight and understand digitally-manipulated content. I believe that media forensics plays an important role in this area, both from an academic standpoint to better understand image and video manipulation, but even more importantly from a societal standpoint to create and raise awareness around the possibilities and moreover, to highlight potential avenues and solutions regarding trust of digital content.