AI-powered instant camera transforms pictures into crude cartoons

A new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered instant camera can take pictures and convert them into crude-looking cartoons that resemble doodles from your old school notebook.

The camera, called Draw This, was developed by Dan Macnish, who first used Google Quick Draw's data set to map millions of doodles and then used an image processor to categorise them.

Afterwards, he assembled a Raspberry Pi-powered camera to develop the transformed pictures using a thermal printer. The knowledge of how to draw these cartoons was integrated within the camera's Rasberry Pi chipset.

However, since Draw This is an instant camera, the original picture will be lost. Once the picture is clicked, the camera's neural network does its magic to create a completely abstract and spectacularly wrong transformation of the picture.

According to report by Engadget, the AI-powered camera is not about clicking an accurate picture, it is more about using AI technology to produce unpredictable artwork.

Macnish said that he was 'playing' with neural networks for object recognition when the idea struck him. "I wondered if I could take the concept of a polaroid one step further, and ask the camera to re-interpret an image, printing out a cartoon instead of a faithful photograph," he added.

AI technologies have come a long way in the recent years with systems being able to accurately predict brain tumours within patients. With numerous significant contributions by AI, Draw This is a fun way to get into creative applications for neural AI networks.