The latest leap forward in visual AI is downright mesmerizing

Appropriately, they call it Photo Wake-Up. On their project page, UW computing scientists Chung-Yi Weng and Brian Curless, along with Facebook's Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, describe a process that can take one single photo and create a character that walks out of the frame toward the viewer. They can also make the character run, sit, or jump. The researchers will present their algorithm later this month at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Long Beach, California, but the software begins by analyzing a still image to detect a human form and fits a morphable body on it. From there it creates a body map, labeling each of the parts.