An AI-powered solution by a pair of Facebook engineers may be able to fix those photos that have been ruined by someone blinking at the wrong moment.
The company published a 10-page research paper (PDF) this week detailing how their system works and likened it to existing photo retouching tools such as red-eye correction.
Facebook’s idea is not entirely original, a similar feature exists in Adobe Photoshop Elements. The engineers acknowledge this in their paper but believe their ExGAN (Exemplar Generative Adversarial Networks) technique offers superior results.
In the examples below, the first column represents an exemplar photo of the subject with their eyes open. The second column shows the original closed eye photo to be fixed. In the third column, a closed eye correction using Adobe Photoshop Elements can be seen. Finally, the fourth column shows the results of Facebook’s algorithm.
As can be seen in the examples above, the engineers’ AI cleverly takes into account variables such as lighting and can adjust the resulting correction accordingly.
The idea is still in its research phase but offers an impressive demonstration of what’s possible when AI is applied to photography. It’s unclear when or if Facebook will roll this out for photos on their social network.
Photos hold our memories and will remain dear to us throughout our lives and perhaps even after down through generations. Any correctional feature which could save an otherwise nice photo from being deleted is sure to be welcomed by users.
What are your thoughts on Facebook’s closed eye correction? Let us know in the comments.
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