Artificial Intelligence Predicts What Will Happen Next In A Video http://t.co/TPopRqQq
Many thanks to my friend Don Berube for pointing this out. Â While the headline slightly overstates the case, it’s clear we’re heading for an era when computers in general will understand meaning and the content of images.Â
Face Detection and Recognition is now prevalent in digital cameras which can detect many faces and even recognize those you tag, giving them preference as to focus and exposure. But Antonio Torralba is more concerned with what’s not the face in a photo: his Artificial Intelligence (A/I/) software tags all objects in an image and makes the image more easily searchable so as to be able to place the photo in an appropriate context. This ability will eventually mean that robots can recognize their surroundings, say in a house or office building, based on what furniture and objects they see around them.
Going one step further with this research, Torralba is also developing systems that can scan a short video clip and predict what is likely to happen next, based on the people and objects in the scene. This should eventually allow robots to anticipate how their actions will influence future events.
Seems like magic to me, but I seen enough of these type of articles – fully acknowledging they’re at the cutting edge of research and many years from practical application in an editing situation – to know that the future will be computer aided way beyond what we have now.
I’ve long said that the application of at least basic editing algorithms (such as in our First Cuts software) isn’t that difficult being largely a matter of modeling the behavior of human edits and what drives their decisions. The problem is having the source information – metadata if you will – to feed the algorithm. Speech transcription, facial detection, emotion detection, and now software to tag all objects in the image and predict what will happen next all point to a much more computer-assisted editing future than most expect.