Researchers at Disney have created an AI system that makes it much easier to make an actor appear younger or older on camera. While artists will still be able to make manual adjustments to make sure the effect looks as realistic as possible, the AI tool could take care of most of the heavy lifting. According to the researchers, the AI can apply these aging effects in less than 5 seconds per frame.
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Disney uses a lot of CGI, and have been aging and de-aging the actors in its films and shows for several years now. However, some of the aging and de-aging CGI has been received better than others – remember the controversies surrounding Rogue One?
Re-aging an actor is typically an expensive and laborious process that requires artists to go through a scene frame-by-frame to manually change the character’s appearance. Attempts have been made in the past to automate the process with neural networks and machine learning.
The researchers have noted that these systems worked very well with still images, but “typically suffer from facial identity loss, poor resolution and unstable results across subsequent video frames.” They claim their solution offers “the first practical, fully-automatic and production-ready method for re-aging faces in video images.”
In the research paper, the team said that FRAN (face re-aging network) couldn’t be trained on a dataset of real people, which would require images showing a subject with the same facial expression, pose, lighting and background at two different and known ages. What they have done, instead, is create a database of several thousand randomly generated faces. They re-aged those synthetic faces using existing machine learning aging tools, then fed the results of that process into FRAN. The neural network analyses the headshot and predicts which parts of a face would be affected by aging and then it applies effects like wrinkles or skin smoothing as a layer on top of the original face.
