How is it ambiguous? Photos is plural and model is singular. That would seem to be completely and utterly clear. Also, how does the fact that this area is heavily researched affect anything?
Could it possibly be that your desire for novelty over incremental improvement in an area heavily mined is what is colouring your expectations, rather than the headline itself being misleading?
I agree that it isn't a big deal but I was genuinely confused when I first read the article. That's why I made this comment.
Even now, I still think that it is a bit misleading because they cannot reconstruct the scene from any photo(s) but only from a sequence of closely related photos which is better described by the word 'video'.
The last paragraph in the article states otherwise though.
"The photos were captured along a linear path; this geometry provided structure that the researchers could leverage to make processing the data more efficient. However, the researchers also generalized their approach so that it can be applied even to a set of images taken with a hand-held camera."
Also, even the photos taken on the rail are not taken as video. You can tell this from the shots where someone is briefly in front of the camera. This is because to get the best data you want the camera to stop at a position on the rail while the shutter is open as otherwise you have to deal with motion blur or keep your exposure very short.
Hmm.. I think it's ambiguous, because if the article was about a new method on cleverly deducing 3D information from a single 2D image (with clever assumptions -- object recognition, lighting analysis, etc.), you would still be able to say "Extracts 3D information from 2D images".
The ambiguity comes from A) Does each run of the algorithm require one image? -- "images". B) Does each run of the algorithm require multiple images? -- "images".
At least, that's what confused me. As to why this being heavily researched adds to my confusion, it's not to try to be disrespectful, or diminish the value of the results or accomplishment. It's just that it's exactly what it is, an incremental research. "Why does it appear on hacker news all of a sudden? There must be something quite exceptional about his (i.e. some more exceptional than 'incremental research')".
I don't want to participate in this argument except to point out that the sentence is definitely ambiguous for at least some dialects (evidence: people, including myself, are getting different readings of the same sentence). The second reading that you aren't getting should be clear enough from context, so I won't spell it out. If I wanted to be really clear one way or the other, I would say:
1) Disney's new image algorithm turns a 2D photo into a 3D model.
or
2) Disney's new image algorithm turns a group of 2D photos into a 3D model.
If I just wanted to get the meaning of (1) across, I would probably phrase my title exactly how OP did. Definitely (not necessarily intentionally) misleading.
Could it possibly be that your desire for novelty over incremental improvement in an area heavily mined is what is colouring your expectations, rather than the headline itself being misleading?