Can’t wait enough for that. But there are so many new methods and papers coming out every week I dont see how tooling can become stable enough to have a unified workflow that doesnt need a clean slate takeover every 6 months

There's quite a few monocular depth estimation models out there, have been for years. This one looks pretty good. That said, the temporal stability seems pretty wobbly, I don't think I'd use it for a self driving car.

The most impressive example was the point cloud they generated from the extreme fisheye lens, that was nice.

Predicting that the background on cloud city was a flat matte painting is also impressive in a way. It does seem to collapse all far field objects into a single plane. That's a decent compromise for many things.

I've seen tools for Generative AI art which do something a lot like that [1]

Generate an image of subject A, apply a depth estimation ML model to figure out which pixels belong to the foreground and cut them out.

Then generate an image of background B with a different prompt, and paste the subject from the first step on top. A sort of automatic collage making process.

[1] https://github.com/Extraltodeus/multi-subject-render

when it is 3d then it can be trivially converted to point cloud (if it is not exportable as point cloud already) and then you can scale, overlay, splice, merge anything with anything trivially. game over !

eu is having plans and making steps for having main highway infrastructure ready for autonomous vehicles, they are changing colors on road signs for years (vertical and horizontal) so cars have higher probability of decoding it, introducing C-ITS, ... This can be another great addition to get us there safely and not by listening to AI nonsense bros. while europe is trying to build stuff while being attacked by russians in more ways than one, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/04/up-to-100-susp... US "elites" are doing nothing just talking about impending doom and buying land on Hawaiian islands or new zealand for apocalyptic shelters....