# video | Paint era artificial intelligence draws realistic landscapes with shadows and reflections

For several years now, developers from variouscorners of the world demonstrate neural networks that can either improve photos or draw pictures from scratch. At the California conference GTC 2019, NVIDIA Research showed something truly amazing - GauGAN artificial intelligence, which creates realistic landscapes based on schematic drawings. Unlike all similar projects, the new product can add shadows and reflections even from the smallest stones and change the seasons.

The name GauGAN was not chosen by chance -Artificial Intelligence is named after the French artist Paul Gauguin. Like many analogues, it consists of a generative-adversarial neural network, one part of which creates images, and the second decides what to change in it in order to achieve the desired result. For training used a huge base of a million landscapes taken from Flickr.

Although the neural network is in theory capable ofto draw even city streets, this version is intended primarily for generating landscapes. The user can sketchily draw mountains, lakes, clouds, stones and other objects - the neural network will quickly create a beautiful photo with the correct shadows and reflections. If you wish, you can change the time of year - the grass will be covered with snow, and the trees will lose their leaves.

It looks like a coloring book, where are listedarrangement of trees, sky and sun. The neural network is able to fill the picture with details, textures, reflections and colors based on what she saw on real images.

Brian Catanzaro, Head of Research

It is noteworthy that the system does not just copytextures from photos and imposes on the sketch, and synthesizes completely new images. Thus, results are obtained, similar to the work of these artists.

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

Did the work of artificial impress you?intelligence? What do you think, for what other purposes can it be used? Write your opinion in the comments, and you can discuss the topic in more detail in our Telegram-chat.