Google AI-Real-Time AR Self-Expression with Machine Learning

Augmented reality (AR) helps you do more with what you see by overlaying digital content and information on top of the physical world. For example, AR features coming to Google Maps will let you find your way with directions overlaid on top of your real world. With Playground - a creative mode in the Pixel camera -- you can use AR to see the world differently. And with the latest release of YouTube Stories and ARCore's new Augmented Faces API you can add objects like animated masks, glasses, 3D hats and more to your own selfies!

One of the key challenges in making these AR features possible is proper anchoring of the virtual content to the real world; a process that requires a unique set of perceptive technologies able to track the highly dynamic surface geometry across every smile, frown or smirk.

Our 3D mesh and some of the effects it enables

To make all this possible, we employ machine learning (ML) to infer approximate 3D surface geometry to enable visual effects, requiring only a single camera input without the need for a dedicated depth sensor. This approach provides the use of AR effects at realtime speeds, using TensorFlow Lite for mobile CPU inference or its new mobile GPU functionality where available. This technology is the same as what powers YouTube Stories' new creator effects, and is also available to the broader developer community via the latest ARCore SDK release and the ML Kit Face Contour Detection API.

An ML Pipeline for Selfie AR

Our ML pipeline consists of two real-time deep neural network models that work together: A detector that operates on the full image and computes face locations, and a generic 3D mesh model that operates on those locations and predicts the approximate surface geometry via regression. Having the face accurately cropped drastically reduces the need for common data augmentations like affine transformations consisting of rotations, translation and scale changes. Instead it allows the network to dedicate most of its capacity towards coordinate prediction accuracy, which is critical to achieve proper anchoring of the virtual content. 

Once the location of interest is cropped, the mesh network is only applied to a single frame at a time, using a windowed smoothing in order to reduce noise when the face is static while avoiding lagging during significant movement.

Our 3D mesh in action

For our 3D mesh we employed transfer learning and trained a network with several objectives: the network simultaneously predicts 3D mesh coordinates on synthetic, rendered data and 2D semantic contours on annotated, real world data similar to those MLKit provides. The resulting network provided us with reasonable 3D mesh predictions not just on synthetic but also on real world data. All models are trained on data sourced from a geographically diverse dataset and subsequently tested on a balanced, diverse testset for qualitative and quantitative performance.