Tencent teaches AI to de-blur photos, edit human faces
In a time when phone cameras are increasingly becoming AI-powered, clicking magnificent photos has become infinitely simpler for laymen photographers. Chinese tech giant Tencent is taking that even further and has come up with two new breakthrough AI systems for image manipulation: one removes blurriness, while the other changes a person's age, mood, facial hair, and a number of other facial features.
Tencent's two AI projects are headed to CVPR 2018
The white papers for both the projects - the de-blurring tool and the face editor tool - were accepted for the reputed Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2018, which will be held in Utah from June 18th to 22nd.
What Tencent's AI-powered de-blurring tool has to offer
Tencent's AI-powered de-blurring tool is something you might find really handy if you're prone to clicking blurry photos. The Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring, Tencent claims, works on large scale de-blurring datasets, and can produce better results qualitatively and quantitatively compared to similar state-of-the-art technologies. Additionally, Tencent's AI has a simpler network structure, smaller number of parameters, and is easier to train.
Tencent's face editing tool incorporates a novel approach
The other, more complex "face editor" AI is an interesting project insofar as it offers an end-to-end solution to almost any kind of face editing. Whereas other similar technology has led to the creation of deep learning systems which require colossal amounts of data, Tencent's AI is lighter, and uses an encoder and decoder system which could potentially function locally.
