Ok, admit it: you've got hundreds, maybe thousands, of family photos sitting around your house on discs and devices. Now there's a new online platform. Live Portrait It offers a free and fun way to turn anything into an animated video in seconds.
The open-source project, launched by China's Kuaishou Technology and Fudan University, uses a specially trained model that can convert animations from videos and webcams and transfer the movements to images and photos.
It's a very clever idea, and an example of how quickly this kind of AI technology is becoming more and more popular.
What sets LivePortrait apart from other similar portrait animators is the amount of customization you can apply to your image to create the final effect.
I tried a few experiments, using both the standard demo videos and images, and some of my own. My first attempt, animating our beloved old Mona Lisa, went better than I expected.
Lisa responded with a great facial expression in response to one of the sample video portraits on the site, but when I tried it on a video I uploaded of myself, the results were not as expressive.
Obviously you need strong expressive movement of the eyes and lips to get the most out of the platform, but it still looks pretty good – my Lucy character was just talking to the camera, so Girl with a Pearl Earring looked like she was mumbling more than anything else.
But the so-called “retargeting” – the ability to set custom lip and eye movement ranges – is very impressive, and a great demonstration of the technology behind something that looks so simple.
The platform leverages around 69 million high-definition video frames as training data and uses some very clever keypoint techniques to generate face shapes that make the end result look incredibly beautiful.
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