Disney’s New Neural Network Can Change an Actor’s Age With Ease
upstart writes:
"Production ready" neural net makes actors younger or older for film or TV:
Disney researchers have created a new neural network that can alter the visual age of actors in TV or film, reports Gizmodo. The technology will allow TV or film producers to make actors appear older or younger using an automated process that will be less costly and time-consuming than previous methods.
Traditionally, when special effects staff on a video or film production need to make an actor look older or younger (a technique Disney calls "re-aging"), they typically either use a 3D scanning and 3D modeling process or a 2D frame-by-frame digital retouching of the actor's face using tools similar to Photoshop. This process can take weeks or longer, depending on the length of the work.
By contrast, Disney's new AI technique, called Face Re-aging Network (FRAN), automates the process. Disney calls it "the first practical, fully automatic, and production-ready method for re-aging faces in video images."
To build FRAN, Disney researchers randomly generated thousands of examples of synthetically aged faces between ages 18 and 85 using StyleGAN2. With that training data in hand, FRAN learned general principles about how a person's appearance changes with age. Now that training is complete, it can apply those aging principles to a real actor in motion, frame by frame.
[...] Considering Disney's history with inserting computer-generated actors into Star Wars films and TV shows, including some that have been de-aged using CGI, we would not be surprised to see technology similar to FRAN widely used in future Disney productions, although no plans have been announced.
The research is being presented at 2022 ACM SIGGRAPH Asia [PDF].
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