Meta releases AI project to animate drawings open source

Meta has made available open source Animated Drawings, a tool that can animate drawings uploaded by users. The company hopes that developers will develop their own apps based on the project.

Animated Drawings is an AI project that can create digital animations from uploaded drawings using object detection, pose estimation models and image processing-based segmentation methods. Meta previously released a web tool for this purpose, with which users could create animations themselves. The company says that web tool was so popular and there was so much interest in additional features that Meta Animated Drawings open sourceso others can create tools with it.

The web tool allows users to upload drawings of human characters, after which Meta asks if it can use these images to improve the model. Sharing the drawing with Meta to improve the model is not necessary to use the tool. Meta said she had hoped to collect around 10,000 drawings in this way, but within the first few months there were already 1.6 million.

‘Many’ of these images turned out not to be drawings of human characters, for which the model was intended and developed, but of fish, birds and other animals, for example. Users also uploaded company logos, anime characters, action figures, pets and stuffed animals. Users also requested additional features, such as transparent backgrounds, different characters that can interact with each other, and better social media sharing features. Developers could develop such functions with the open source code, Meta thinks. The project is part of Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team and started in 2021.