While the photography game has led the manufacturers to make their phones and cameras to record at faster speeds, NVIDIA has taken the other route and has managed to convert your normal videos into high-quality slow-motion videos.
The researchers at NVIDIA have now developed an AI-based system that can convert normal videos recorded at 30 frames-per-second into 240fps footage by generating the missing intermediate frames.
According to the research paper, the researchers trained their deep-learning system on over 11,000 videos of everyday and sports activities shot at 240fps. With these videos, the system’s neural network learnt about the difference between frames and use it to generate intermediate frames in videos recorded at 30 frames-per-second.
To train the system, researchers used NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and PyTorch deep learning framework with acceleration by cuDNN.
NVIDIA’s researchers’ team mentioned that the smartphones today can record slow-motion videos. However they also also noted that it requires more memories and more power for these devices to record at higher frame rate.
The researchers wrote.
“There are many memorable moments in your life that you might want to record with a camera in slow-motion because they are hard to see clearly with your eyes: the first time a baby walks, a difficult skateboard trick, a dog catching a ball. While it is possible to take 240-frame-per-second videos with a cell phone, recording everything at high frame rates is impractical, as it requires large memories and is power-intensive for mobile devices,”
It’s worth noting here that this is not the very first development in software based artificial video frame-rate enhancement. There are some softwares and plugins which are used to do the same thing but they do at very different levels of quality. Most popular of them is the Twixtor which has been shipping updates for years and is used with editing tools such as Premiere Pro, and Vegas. But frankly the one we just saw here from NVIDIA, is really something for the industry. It’s impressive to see those missing frames filled by artifical intelligence very smoothly.
Yes, that means the everyday videos, you record or you have recorded earlier, can now be converted to high-quality 240 frames-per-second videos to make them slo-mo.
