Disney Invents Studio-Quality AI That Ages & De-Ages Actors In Real Time
When it comes to introducing younger or older versions of characters, filmmakers have a few options: They can either cast a lookalike that fits the desired age group, employ the magic of makeup or prosthetics, or use digital age-altering tools.
The latter, unfortunately, can take days or even weeks as they require frame-by-frame manual painting.
Researchers at Disney Research Studios say they have created “the first” re-aging and de-aging technology for faces in video images that’s “practical, fully-automatic, and production-ready.” The artificial intelligence can age subjects up or down without the waiting game or overspending post-production resources.
Disney’s researchers acknowledge that re-aging techniques aren’t new, but they often deliver unstable footage with facial feature loss or poor resolution. Their version, on the other hand, is built for the film studio. Called the Face Re-Aging Network (FRAN), the new neural network accurately adapts to moving images and even to moments where a subject may not be looking at the camera, Gizmodo reports.
Disney Research Hub just announced their new neural network product "FRAN". Just input any video and re-age with its built in controls. Film quality results in no time at all.
— Del @ NaughtyDog (@TheCartelDel) November 30, 2022
Always impressed with the magic that vfx engineers perform each year pic.twitter.com/D1s96dKXLb
The team collected thousands of AI-generated faces and studied how existing machine-learning technology would approach those subjects. The researchers then used their learnings to train FRAN.
Where FRAN differs is that, rather than generating new headshots, it recognizes the parts of an actor’s face that could be affected by age, be it in the smile lines or wrinkles. It then layers those features over the subject’s real face for a more photorealistic effect that remains consistent. Disney Research Studios says the results retain “unprecedented temporal stability and preservation of facial identity across variable expressions, viewpoints, and lighting conditions.”
Most importantly, Disney stresses that the technology is actually usable by the industry, as it gives artists creative freedom to control the scale of re-aging, “a feature that is largely important in real production pipelines and often overlooked in related research work.”
See some of the results for yourself below. You can also read Disney’s full research paper here.
[via Gizmodo and Disney Research Studios, cover photo 199106958 © Zay Nyi Nyi | Dreamstime.com]
