MyHertiage introduces Deep Nostalgia: a really remarkable innovation

 

Deep Nostalgia Page

MyHeritage.org has unveiled another amazing development, Deep Nostalgia. You have to see it to believe it. You can animate your family photos. This is in addition to colorizing, enhancing, and cleaning up those same photos. Here is the link to the Deep Nostalgia Page. Yes, that is a photo of me and my wife Ann shortly after we got married 53 years ago. Here is a bit more about the process from an email.

[We are] excited to announce the release of our latest feature for historical photos, Deep Nostalgia™! Deep Nostalgia™ animates the faces in still photos, and gives family history a fresh new perspective by producing a realistic depiction of how a person could have moved and looked if they were captured on video. 

The technology for animating the faces in photos was licensed by MyHeritage from D-ID, a company that specializes in video reenactment using deep learning. Deep Nostalgia™ uses several pre-recorded driver videos, which direct the movements in the animation and consist of sequences of real human gestures. A preferred driver is automatically selected for each face based on its orientation, and then seamlessly applied to the photo. The result is a short, high-quality video animation of an individual face that can smile, blink, and move. To achieve optimal results, the photos are enhanced prior to animation using the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer, which brings blurry and low-resolution faces into focus and increases their resolution. 

My grandchildren are impressed. They think it looks like Harry Potter technology and it does. You have to go to the Deep Nostalgia page to see how it looks. The photos are converted to an MP-4 video. The process does not change or affect the original photo.