Facebook's new AI engine can 'open' closed eyes
What's the story
Despite there being several software which manipulate photos to make someone look better, the blink has been a dogged adversary to a good photo.
So far, software solutions weren't adept at replacing closed eyes in a photograph with open ones.
However, Facebook, with its massive repository of photos with people blinking, has come up with an AI engine which is an eye-opener (couldn't help the pun).
Earlier softwares
Earlier software were rather daft, when it came to eyes
Earlier, image manipulating software solutions would paste open eyes on someone's face without any consideration for consistency with the rest of the image. This happened as machines didn't (still don't) have an intuitive understanding of eyes, color, or anything for that matter.
For instance, you could find a set of weird eyes on yourself, or could find a different skin color around the pasted eyes.
The AI
How Facebook's new AI engine works
Facebook's new AI engine is something called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and is basically a machine learning system that fools itself into thinking that its creations are real.
In the GAN, one part of the network learns to recognize faces while the other part continuously produces images that, based on repeated feedback from the first part, keep growing in realism.
Testing
Testers couldn't tell real and pasted eyes apart
Facebook took a different approach, feeding the GAN with "exemplar" data showing the target person with their eyes open.
Based on this, the GAN learns not just how a person should look with their eyes open, but also learns their eye shape, color, etc.
The results were so convincing that more than half the time, testers couldn't tell pasted eyes apart from real ones.