About

​Please join Charlottesville Data Science for the talk *From Still Photos to 3D Scene: An Introduction to Neural Radiance Fields*. **Alison Lu**, a data scientist at ENSCO Rail, will explore this breakthrough in computer vision and discuss its applications in industry settings. ​We'll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia on the evening of Tuesday, August 4. We look forward to seeing you there! *→ We're moving our events calendar to [Luma](https://luma.com/8lxhoxcs)! We'll continue cross-posting our events here on Meetup for the foreseeable future, but we'll use Luma for planning and all event-related communications. **Please*** ***[head over there to RSVP](https://luma.com/8lxhoxcs), and consider subscribing to our [Luma calendar](https://luma.com/cvilleds)!*** *←* **About the talk** ​What if you could create a 3D, 360-degree scene out of a couple dozen pictures? Traditional methods of doing so may need expensive equipment, hundreds of overlapping photos, and precise location data. **Neural Radiance Fields** (NeRF), first introduced in 2020, are a breakthrough in machine vision, allowing a trained network to create a photorealistic scene on relatively small amounts of data. There is a growing set of applications for NeRF, from digital VFX to medical imaging. ​In this talk, we will go into depth on what NeRF is and how it works, as well as a genealogy of improvements and related techniques from leaders in the field. There will be a demo on how to create scenes and a discussion on adaptations to the transportation industry. **About the speaker** ​Alison Lu is a data scientist working at ENSCO Rail, a company that provides integrated technology products for railroads. She has been a part of the Charlottesville Data Science Community since 2023.