Mona Lisa frown: Machine learning brings old paintings and photos to life – TechCrunch

Machine learning researchers have produced a system that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single frame of a person's face, opening up the possibility of animating not just photos but also paintings. It's not perfect, but when it works, it is -- like much AI work these days -- eerie and fascinating. The model is documented in a paper published by Samsung AI Center, which you can read here on Arxiv. It's a new method of applying facial landmarks on a source face -- any talking head will do -- to the facial data of a target face, making the target face do what the source face does. This in itself isn't new -- it's part of the whole synthetic imagery issue confronting the AI world right now (we had an interesting discussion about this recently at our Robotics AI event in Berkeley).