Facebook Wants To Fix Blinks In Your Photos With AI

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People blinking in your photos may not be a problem for much longer. Facebook is working on ways to fix them with AI.

AI is used for all kinds of things. Now, Facebook might start using it to fix up your photos – and specifically when there’s a photo in which someone is blinking at the wrong time. Yes, it could ruin the best. AI is pretty smart and could “paint in” those eyes, or make someone smile. But up until now, it’s using other people’s eyes. It doesn’t always look great.

Facebook researchers seem to have found a solution. Use your own eyes or mouth or the owner’s to fix the photo. Pretty simple and ingenious actually. In a recent research paper, titled “Eye In-Painting with Exemplar Generative Adversarial Networks: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)” Brian Dolhansky and Cristian Canton Ferrer propose using parts of the owner’s face from other photos that Facebook itself has on record.

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Dolhansky and Ferrer tried two approaches: One uses a reference image of the eyes, and the second gets a version of the eyes – from Facebook’s facial recognition storage to use in the approach. The researchers trained the AI with actual images of the people in question – at least three images per person.

While the AI helps “paint in” the eyes, the reference library provides the “identity” of the subject. Thus, the AI was able to create much more realistic results. The research led to better accuracy overall, but are far from perfect. The program could not accurately reflect angles and shadows etc. It may be some time before those variations are effectively factored in.

Coming to your Facebook profile in the future: The ability to correct your bad photos? We’ll see. For now, you can find the research here.