Meta has made available Animated Drawings, an artificial intelligence project that allows anyone to bring their drawings to life, even if they are simple doodles or stick figures. The so-called Animated Drawings promise to help developers in their experiences. The project was made possible by Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), the Meta group in charge of studying artificial intelligence and its applications
Meta launches Animated Drawings, an artificial intelligence model that gives life to our sketches, even those made in pencil
Meta's Animated Drawings project is born in the 2021 when FAIR researchers decided to apply the latest in computer vision to create a fast and intuitive pipeline for animating human-like figures featured in character designs. Drawings are a familiar and fun way to express ourselves, and the characters we draw, often strange and whimsical, might come to life through animation. However, creating many drawings to create the illusion of movement can be tedious, and existing animation tools can be difficult for new users to use.
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To solve this problem, the researchers used object detection models, pose estimates, and image processing-based segmentation methods to quickly create a digital version of the drawing that can be deformed and animated using computer graphics techniques. However, one of the problems was the scarcity of character designs at the scale needed to train a computer vision model. To overcome this, they created Animated Drawings Demo, a publicly accessible web tool where creators could upload their own drawings, view/correct some model predictions, and receive a character animation from their drawings, all for less by one minute.
Meta Animated Drawings' animated drawing demo had a positive reaction with over 1,6 million images uploaded by users looking to animate not only human figures, but also company logos, stuffed animals, anime characters and so much more. The demo sparked interest in more drawing and animation-based experiences, such as transparent backgrounds, support for different types of skeletons, more interacting characters, sound effects, background scenery, and text overlays.
