Deep Nostalgia, the application that brings old photos to life
Deep learning technology has been used to bring to life relatives in old photographs, whose faces move realistically in videos created by the Deep Nostalgia tool.
The company MyHeritage, specialized in making family genealogical trees and searching historical archives, is responsible for this system and has assured in a statement that Deep Nostalgia provides “a realistic representation of how a person from an old photo could have moved and looked if it would have been captured on video. “
The tool uses deep learning algorithms to animate any of the faces in the user’s old family photos to see them move, blink and smile. It works on black and white and color or colored photos, and automatically enhances them before video with MyHeritage in Color.
MyHeritage licensed the technology to animate photos from D-ID, a company specializing in video recreation through deep learning, and integrated this technology to animate the faces in historical photos and create high-quality, realistic video footage.
In the resulting videos – short animations – it is possible to apply different sequences of gestures to the people portrayed. These sequences guide the movement of the head so that it is possible for family members to smile, blink, and turn their heads.
Users can use this tool with a free MyHeritage account, and to use it it is only necessary to upload the old photograph to the company’s website in the Deep Nostalgia section, and the system automatically detects the faces and allows you to choose which one to animate.
The process of creating an animated video lasts between 10 and 20 seconds, depending on the duration of the animation and the number of gestures that are applied, as explained by its creators. The service also has a sharing function to send the result to friends and family or download it in MP4 format.
To recreate the gestures, MyHeritage has captured real gestures of its employees, but wanted to emphasize that the result is not real. The company seeks to avoid the creation of ‘deepfakes’ and therefore incorporates a special raised movement icon that looks like a moving ball in the lower left corner of the photos. Another icon, a wand, indicates whether the image has been colored.