An AI for CGI

As movies become more CGI-focused, filmmakers have to be increasingly adept at "compositing" - the process of merging foreground and background images, like placing actors on top of planes, or planets, or into fictional worlds like Black Panther's Wakanda. Making these images look realistic isn't easy. Editors have to capture the subtle aesthetic transitions between foreground and background, which can be especially difficult for intricate materials like human hair that people are used to seeing look a certain way. "The tricky thing about these images is that not every pixel solely belongs to one object," says Yagiz Aksoy, a visiting researcher at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "In many cases it can be hard to determine which pixels are part of the background and which are part of a specific person." Getting these details right is tedious, time-consuming and difficult for anyone but the most seasoned of editors.