The Facebook parent company Meta has published a rather unusual open source project: Under the name Animated Drawings, it allows users to bring stick figures to life with artificial intelligence (AI). Just a few days ago, the company released another free tool, the “Segment Anything Model”, which comes from its in-house AI research laboratory.
The AI project started with a web-based tool that Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team released two years ago. There, users can upload a human-like figure. The character can then be cropped by drawing a bounding box. The AI then makes a suggestion as to where the joints could be. These points can be adjusted by the user before the animation begins. If you wanted, you could then provide the Meta character for training purposes for the AI.
1.6 million images uploaded
AI is used in object recognition, pose estimation models, and image processing. Within a few months of going online, more than 1.6 million images were uploaded, for which Meta received permission from the uploaders to use them for training purposes. In addition to classic doodles, company logos, anime characters, fish and stuffed animals were also included, although the tool is not specialized in this at all.
According to a blog post, the publication of the source code is intended as a way of saying thank you to the community. It allows interested parties to further develop the software. According to the information, frequent requests were sound, backgrounds and text overlays. The project was published on Github with a dataset of around 180,000 drawings. It was written 98 percent in Python and is licensed under the MIT License.
(mki)
