Bring Your Doodles to Life with Animated Drawings by Meta

Meta has recently released an artificial intelligence (AI) project that enables individuals to bring their doodles to life in the form of animated drawings. In an effort to provide richer experiences, the company has open-sourced this project, allowing other developers to access the code and a dataset consisting of roughly 180,000 images.

Initially, the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team launched a web-based version of the tool in 2021. Users are required to submit a drawing of a single human-like figure or select a demo figure, and subsequently, resize a capture box to fit the creation. The tool allows users to make final tweaks to the drawing before adjusting the joints, and ultimately view an animated version of their sketch. There are four categories of preset animations to choose from: dance, funny, jumping, and walking.

The Animated Drawings tool employs a variety of models such as object detection, pose estimation, and image processing-based segmentation methods to capture and animate a digital version of a drawing. The images uploaded by users have served as a training dataset for the project, with Meta receiving permission to use over 1.6 million images, including company logos, anime characters, fish, and stuffed animals, despite the tool initially stipulating only human figures would work.

Requests for a more comprehensive toolset, incorporating sound effects and text overlays, as well as the broad array of images uploaded by users, indicated a significant interest in further drawing-to-animation experiences. As a result, Meta has open-sourced the project along with the dataset, which can be utilized as a starting point for developers to build on and extend the project, fostering innovation and collaboration within the open-source community, as stated in a blog post by the company.