It takes advantage of the efficiency of unidirectional recurrent networksandtheeffectiveness ofsliding-window-based methods.

This paper studies the problem of real-world video super-resolution (VSR) for animation videos, and reveals three key improvements for practical animation VSR. First, recent real-world super-resolution approaches typically rely on degradation simulation using basic operators without any learning capability, such as blur, noise, and compression. In this work, we propose to learn such basic operators from real low-quality animation videos, and incorporate the learned ones into the degradation generation pipeline. Such neural-network-based basic operators could help to better capture the distribution of real degradations. Second, a large-scale high-quality animation video dataset, AVC, is built to facilitate comprehensive training and evaluations for animation VSR. Third, we further investigate an efficient multi-scale network structure. It takes advantage of the efficiency of unidirectional recurrent networks and the effectiveness of sliding-window-based methods. Thanks to the above delicate designs, our method, AnimeSR, is capable of restoring real-world low-quality animation videos effectively and efficiently, achieving superior performance to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Traditional animation generation methods depend on training generative models with human-labelled data, entailing a sophisticated multi-stage pipeline that demands substantial human effort and incurs high training costs. Due to limited prompting plans, these methods typically produce brief, information-poor, and context-incoherent animations. To overcome these limitations and automate the animation process, we pioneer the introduction of large multimodal models (LMMs) as the core processor to build an autonomous animation-making agent, named Anim-Director. This agent mainly harnesses the advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities of LMMs and generative AI tools to create animated videos from concise narratives or simple instructions. Specifically, it operates in three main stages: Firstly, the Anim-Director generates a coherent storyline from user inputs, followed by a detailed director's script that encompasses settings of character profiles and interior/exterior descriptions, and context-coherent scene descriptions that include appearing characters, interiors or exteriors, and scene events. Secondly, we employ LMMs with the image generation tool to produce visual images of settings and scenes. These images are designed to maintain visual consistency across different scenes using a visual-language prompting method that combines scene descriptions and images of the appearing character and setting. Thirdly, scene images serve as the foundation for producing animated videos, with LMMs generating prompts to guide this process. The whole process is notably autonomous without manual intervention, as the LMMs interact seamlessly with generative tools to generate prompts, evaluate visual quality, and select the best one to optimize the final output.

The DeepFakes, which are the facial manipulation techniques, is the emerging threat to digital society. Various DeepFake detection methods and datasets are proposed for detecting such data, especially for face-swapping. However, recent researches less consider facial animation, which is also important in the DeepFake attack side. It tries to animate a face image with actions provided by a driving video, which also leads to a concern about the security of recent payment systems that reply on liveness detection to authenticate real users via recognising a sequence of user facial actions. However, our experiments show that the existed datasets are not sufficient to develop reliable detection methods. While the current liveness detector cannot defend such videos as the attack. As a response, we propose a new human face animation dataset, called DeepFake MNIST+, generated by a SOTA image animation generator. It includes 10,000 facial animation videos in ten different actions, which can spoof the recent liveness detectors. A baseline detection method and a comprehensive analysis of the method is also included in this paper. In addition, we analyze the proposed dataset's properties and reveal the difficulty and importance of detecting animation datasets under different types of motion and compression quality.