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The researchers say their enhancements go beyond what other photorealistic conversion processes are capable of by also integrating geometric information from GTA V itself. It doesn’t entirely behave like it’s real, but it looks very much like it’s built from real things. It’s dimmer and from a different angle, but it almost captures what I imagine a smoother, more interactive version of scrolling through Google Maps’ Street View could be like. The group offers a more in-depth and thorough explanation for how image enhancement actually works in their paper (PDF), but as I understand it, the Cityscapes Dataset that was used - built largely from photographs of German streets - filled in a lot of the detail. The Intel researchers suggest some of that photorealism comes from the datasets they fed their neural network.
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