Researchers pave the road to true 3D AI

Abu Dhabi, UAE: Researchers at Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a leading global research centre in the United Arab Emirates, have developed a new algorithm for representing 3D textures that improves filtering, analytics, and AI. This will lead to AI applications that are faster and more efficient.

"We aim to create the building blocks that would kick off an explosion of neural networks for building 3D AI algorithms," said TII senior researcher Claudio Tortorici, who led this research.

Early implementations of the new algorithm helped extract faces from 3D scenes, generate 2D maps representing 3D data, and combined distinct kinds of 3D information into 2D pictures.

Tortorici believes that future researchers will allow artificial intelligence to process 3D data natively.

He observed that most computer vision conferences include the term "signal processing" in their title, which refers to one-dimensional data. However, the images comprise 2D data and we live in a 3D world.

Interest in convolutional neural networks for processing image data has exploded in the last year, but these are not practical for 3D data. Tortorici said: "These kinds of algorithms have not traditionally worked well on 3D data."

Although companies process 3D imagery today using AI algorithms, this often involves computational gymnastics to make things work. This new preprocessing technique, called CSIOR, could open all kinds of opportunities.