Video editing techniques are evolving more and more. This Wednesday (30), researchers from the disney presented a neural network that promises to let people older or younger without much editing. But the technology known as FRAN (Face Reaging Network) it is not available for anyone to use.
The solution aims to solve a big problem in cinema: changing the age of actors. After all, the story can take place in the present, but if the script includes scenes from the past or the future, the character can’t stay the same, right?
For this, the studios use four techniques. The first is the use of another actor to live out the character. Studios can also do makeup to make the person look older, for example.
It is also possible to appeal to video edits. At this point, the researchers point to an approach with a face completely modeled in 3D and another way out, with edits of the frames in 2D. But all this is quite complex and requires a lot of time to complete.
And that’s where Disney’s solution comes in, which makes all of this almost effortless.
How does the FRAN proposed by Disney work?
Details about FRAN were reported in a study published by the studio. In the paper, titled “Production-Ready Face Re-Aging for Visual Effects,” the researchers worked in two steps to produce the system.
First, it was necessary to train the aging and rejuvenation process network, known as “re-aging”. For this, a database was created with 2,000 identities, each with 14 different ages in the range of 18 to 85 years. In all, this process provided 196 training pairs per sampled identity (including age-matched pairs).
Afterwards, the study focused on the FRAN, the artificial intelligence (AI) that uses the neural network to edit the contents. With all this in hand, the researchers were able to change the age of several people, regardless of ethnicity, with high quality. The change was successful for both photos and videos.
“Our results are not only smooth and continuous in time, but also very closely match the identity of the input image,” says the study. “Furthermore, our method works well for both realistically increasing and decreasing age.”
According to the researchers, the results indicate that the technology is ready to be used in productions. That way, Disney can save time (and money) by changing the actors’ ages without relying on manual edits.
The article was signed by researchers Gaspard Zoss, Prashanth Chandran, Eftychios Sifakis, Markus Gross, Paulo Gotardo and Derek Bradley, all from Disney Research, and submitted to ACM SIGGRAPH Asia.
The study is available free of charge on the entity’s website: studios.disneyresearch.com🇧🇷
With information: Ars Technica and Gizmodo
https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/2022/12/01/rede-neural-da-disney-deixa-voce-mais-novo-ou-mais-velho-em-videos/