Disney has developed a new neural network that rejuvenates or ages the appearance of people in a faster and more precise process, in order to use it in film or television recordings.
The Disney system receives the Fran’s name,for the acronym of Face Re-aging Network or face reaging network and unlike other techniques based on artificial intelligence (AI), it offers an automatic age readjustment process.
FRAN offers artists a set of tools to adjust the effect of age on a person’s face in a precise and direct way, important in film or television production, where sometimes the same actor plays his character at different stages of life.
Other AI-based systems rely on three-dimensional modeling of the face, which is animated and rendered to impersonate the actual face of the actor, or frame-by-frame digital retouching on a two-dimensional model.
“As far as we know, FRAN is the first method to provide aging results high-resolution and time-stable videos that show faces in different expressions and under conditions of free point of view, depth, movement and lighting”, have expressed those responsible for this project in the text of the research.
The system “offers realistic and continuous reaging over an age range of between 18 and 85 years“, and has the potential to improve current re-aging efforts “by reducing the time it takes to re-age entire takes from a matter of days to just a few hours or even minutes“.
It is not, for the moment, a perfect system, since FRAN presents difficulties in adjusting very young ages and in large image changes. Even so, its use may have negative purposes,something that its developers are aware of, who, however, emphasize its use for entertainment purposes.