Meta is raising the bar in the field of artificial intelligence by committing more resources to improve its AI capabilities than the Metaverse. With the competition in the tech industry intensifying, Meta is announcing one AI-based project after another to keep up with the competition. Recently, the company released the Segment Anything Model (SAM), and now it has come up with another interesting project called “Animated Drawings.”
This project is an open-source initiative that allows users to turn their doodles into animations. The dataset for this project consists of up to 180,000 annotated drawings by amateur individuals, which Meta has published for AI researchers and creators to use and innovate further.
The AI system performs a series of subtasks, including person detection, segmentation, and pose estimation, to convert the sketch into animation. The system can also remove paper creases and light glare, which are common in sketches. With these subtasks, computer vision captures a digital version of the doodling or drawing, and the digital graphics technology then converts it into an animation.
The Animated Drawings Demo was introduced by Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team at the end of 2021. To create a large dataset with permission from amateur artists, the team asked users to submit their drawings while ensuring privacy.
According to the company’s blog post, individuals could upload images, review or adjust annotation predictions, and receive a brief animation featuring a human-like character within the picture via the browser-based demo. The platform’s demo has received approximately 6.7 million uploaded images, and the system has been used by 3.2 million individuals worldwide.
This project is expected to inspire a new generation of creators with its expressiveness and accessible possibilities. It will also be an asset for other researchers interested in exploring the potential applications of AI. As Meta continues to devote more resources to enhancing its AI capabilities, we can expect to see more innovative AI-based projects from the company.
