Google Meet Introduces In-Browser Machine Learning Solution For Blurring And Replacing Background In A Live Video

Google recently announced ways to blur and replace the background in Google Meet for better focus on the person rather than the surrounding. The new features are powered by cutting-edge web machine learning (ML) technologies built with MediaPipe that work directly in the browser, without any extra steps like installing additional software. One of the main motives for developing these features was to provide real-time, in-browser performance on almost all modern devices. It accomplishes this by combining efficient on-device ML models, WebGL-based rendering, and web-based ML inference via XNNPACK and TFLite. The new features of Meet are developed with MediaPipe, Google's open-source framework. It helps building multimodal (for example, video, audio, any time series data), cross-platform (i.e., Android, iOS, web, edge devices) applied ML pipelines.