ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,437,470, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).
"Neural shading" was invented by Graham L. Fyffe (Culver City, Calif.) and Andrew P. Mason (Cottesloe, Australia).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Rendering an avatar for a user in a communication session includes obtaining one or more identity textures for the user for the session and obtaining, throughout the session, shading latents for the user. The shading latents are derived from lighting and other information and are utilized as input into a decoder to obtain one or more neural maps. A target texture is generated by warping the identity textures based on the ne...