Content generation with AI technology has come a long way over the past year. With just text descriptions, many people have been able to create billions of realistic and virtually stunning images using some popular tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.
Now, new explorations and advancements have led to the emergence of tools that can turn images into short-form videos and animations.
Image-to-Animation AI Generator Are On The Rise
The AI research team of China’s technology giant Alibaba recently introduced an AI model that can produce “consistent and controllable character animation results” from still images. Called “Animate Anyone,” the model is reportedly able to make short-form video content from images – basically an image-to-animation generator.
The team described Animate Anyone as “a character animation framework which can transform photos into videos as controlled by desired pose sequences and achieving temporal continuity.” In the research paper, the developers said the model is trained on an internal dataset of 5K character video clips.
Although Animate Anyone is still under development, it has already been used to create a number of impressive animations that have garnered lots of attention across the internet. In an official update posted on Github, the team disclosed that there was massive interest and inquiries regarding a demo or the source code.
“We’ve received lots of inquiries regarding a demo or the source code. We want to assure you that we are actively working on preparing the demo and code for public release,” the team wrote. “Although we cannot commit to a specific release date at this very moment, please be certain that the intention to provide access to both the demo and our source code is firm.”
Alibaba’s Animate Anyone Boosts Realistic Results
Animate Anyone stands out from other animation tools like AnimateDiff and Warpfusion due to its ability to produce realistic and indistinguishable results.
The team boosts that Animate Anyone can effectively maintain the spatial and temporal consistency of video character appearance, animate any character image into a video, and produce high-definition videos without issues – features that some of the existing tools lack.
The release date of Animate Anyone has not been specified, but the team specified that the goal is to “ensure that it is robust and user-friendly, transitioning it from an academic prototype to a more polished version.”
