鱼羊 Posted by Ao Fei Si
qubits | Public account qbitai
Cutting-edge AI technology has now been used in the Olympic Games. And the support behind it is China’s scientific and technological power.
Just as the competition day of the Paris Olympics officially started, while gradually igniting the audience's passion, an "Olympic 8-minute" short film also attracted attention.
Not only did International Olympic Committee President Bach strongly recommend: "Thanks to China's AI technology, the achievements of these women in sports have given a new color."
Netizens also praised:
AI technology brings historical moments with modern clarity. Bring it into your present life.
short film titled "To the greatness of her" was jointly launched by Alibaba and the International Olympic Committee.
The video stories of great women in the century-old Olympic history are condensed into precious 8 minutes, aiming to pay tribute to the generations of female athletes who have continued to achieve from 0 to 1, continue to break through and fight in the Olympic arena.
It is worth noting that this 8-minute short film not only uses AI to re-color the historical moment, but also has the blessing of large models and aigc technology.
She who never fades
Many friends may have noticed that the Olympic Games will be held in Paris again after 100 years. One of the obvious changes is that 100 years ago, there were few female athletes participating in Olympic events, but at the 2024 Paris Olympics, The ratio of male and female athletes reached 1:1 for the first time.
And another significant change is that this is also the first Olympic Games where AI technology is widely used.
△ Alibaba Cloud ai enhanced video
Alibaba Cloud and the International Olympic Committee join hands to use the technological changes brought about by the second change to show the public more precious competition moments in the history of female athletes who promoted the first change. .
Such as Suzanne Lenglen (suzanne lenglen), one of the greatest athletes in the history of women's tennis.
Between 1921 and 1926, Susan Lundgren remained the world's number one for 5 years.
In addition to her impressive performance on the court, Susan was also the first to break the conservative rules for women's tennis sportswear -
Changing long sleeves to short sleeves, changing long skirts to knee-length pleated skirts, and changing the length of tennis skirts The weight has been changed from 18 kg to 0.18 kg.
It can be said that starting from her, female tennis players were able to break free from the constraints of clothing and play their best on the court.
Another example is the first Olympic mixed skeet women’s champion Zhang Shan.
Before 1992, women's skeet was not an official Olympic event. The skeet competition was a mixed event for men and women. That is to say, female athletes were allowed to participate in the men's competition of this event.
Before Zhang Shan, this event had always been dominated by male athletes. And in 1992, Zhang Shan changed everything.
In the preliminaries, Zhang Shan successfully entered the semi-finals with a score of 150 targets. Then, he tied the world record in the semi-finals and entered the finals with a score of 200 in 200 shots.
In the final, Zhang Shan faced the challenge of 5 male players alone. In the end, she won the game and won the respect and cheers of the audience.
At the time of awarding, the opponents who won the silver and bronze medals carried Zhang Shan high. A classic photo was also recorded on the spot by Xu Haifeng, another legend of the Chinese shooting team.
There is also the first woman to officially participate in the Boston Marathon - Kathrine Switzer (kathrine switzer).
In 1967, 19-year-old Catherine "brave the world's disdain" and concealed her gender to register for the Boston Marathon. At that time, the marathon was considered an "unsuitable sport for women". Even during Catherine's own race, organizer staff suddenly appeared to tear off her number plate and yelled at her: "Get out of here." track”.
Until she finished the race, the organizing committee did not acknowledge the fact that she finished the race and scolded her for disrupting the race.
"What do you want to prove?"
This was the question that the reporter at the time asked Catherine.
html Today, 360 years later, Catherine personally gave the answer in these 8 minutes in Paris:
It’s not just me, every woman is qualified to do what she wants to do.
These are the three protagonists in the film "She Never Fades". In order to restore their historical moments more realistically and vividly, it can be seen that Alibaba Cloud uses AI restoration technology to colorize old photos and videos and complete them based on generation technology.
This project mainly contains three major processing steps.
Clarification: With the help of image super-resolution technology, low-resolution old photos are converted into high-resolution clear images.
Colorization: Add realistic colors to black and white photos through advanced image colorization technology.
video frame interpolation based on generation technology. The specific technical solutions involved in
include image coloring, image denoising and super-resolution based on generative adversarial networks and convolutional neural network , as well as controllable image generation technology.
The AI technology behind "Her"
It sounds like the restoration of old photos and videos is nothing new, but in fact when the object of restoration becomes a moving image, the technical difficulty behind it is greatly increased.
For example, Susan Rundgren’s photo was taken more than 100 years ago, and the effect is like this:
On the one hand, the human face can no longer be seen clearly.
On the other hand, the large number of background viewers increases the complexity of the repair.
The solution that the Alibaba Cloud repair team came up with is to use generative AI technologies such as large models + stable diffusion, and add text guidance to allow AI to use its imagination while controlling this imagination so that it does not break away from history itself.
Specifically, technicians first used diffusion technology to redraw the character's face. During the redrawing process, in order to retain the original character information, real historical information will be used as a reference, and technologies such as controlnet will be used to control the lines and depth of the character's face.
For complex backgrounds, they are blurry due to perspective. The restoration team adopted a solution that focused on the key characters and elements in the photo, while only repairing the background on a small scale, and finally splicing the front and rear backgrounds together.
In order to make the colors more natural, the Alibaba Cloud restoration team also combined the professional opinions of historians and studied the historical color library to achieve an accuracy of more than 80% in AI coloring.
In addition, in terms of super-resolution, Alibaba Cloud’s technical solution can super-resolution a 640p resolution image to 4k resolution within 1 second, increasing the clarity by 25 times. In terms of
video repair, the Alibaba Cloud repair team mainly solved the consistency and continuity issues before and after the video.
For example, if you repair a running video, if you just color it frame by frame, the algorithm may turn the athlete's pants red for a while and black for a while. The
repair team has specially optimized this, including carefully splitting the video and adjusting the coloring effect and clarity to the best segment by segment.
Another characteristic of motion images is that the motion changes very quickly. In this regard, the Alibaba Cloud restoration team used generation technology to interpolate frames in the old video to achieve better continuity effects.
In fact, due to the difficulty of restoration, the final 8-minute film of Bao we saw was presented after multiple rounds of repeated revisions.
During this process, the restoration team patiently tried to figure it out over and over again, and even "can't tell which picture looks more like me." The core reason is that during the restoration process, the technicians themselves were also affected by the female athletes. Inspiration:
hopes that by restoring this set of photos, more people can learn about these important events in history. At the same time, we also hope that through repair technology, the spirit of women such as Ms. Catherine who broke barriers and raised competitive standards can inspire more people.
This is exactly the value of cutting-edge technology for historical and cultural heritage:
ai can allow people living today to more intuitively and truly feel the historical imprints buried in the long river of time. The power of science and technology is playing an increasingly important role in the continuation and protection of the humanistic spirit.
In fact, every Olympic Games brings a lot of emotions and tears not only to the athletes, but also to the spectators.
When the stories are connected and observed in the dimension of a hundred years or even longer, these emotions will condense into a humanistic spirit that is more worthy of inheritance and remembering.
"She Never Fades" is like this. The same is true for the higher, faster, stronger and more united spirit on the field. The blessing of
ai technology has strengthened the protection and dissemination of historical images. On the one hand, it allows the public to understand the stories and developments at a lower threshold.
On the other hand, it also allows everyone to see the value brought by a deeper combination of humanities and technology.
one more thing
As mentioned earlier, the Paris Olympics is the first Olympic Games where AI technology is widely used.
If you have also followed the competition, you must be familiar with such a high degree of freedom, "bullet time" style replay screen:
In addition, at the Paris Olympics, cloud computing is replacing satellites and becoming the main method of live broadcasting of Olympic events. More than two-thirds of the Olympic live broadcast signals will be transmitted from Paris to more than 200 countries and regions around the world through the Olympic broadcast cloud supported by Alibaba Cloud, reaching billions of viewers.
The combination of cloud + ai is bringing more fresh and cool experiences to the global audience sitting in front of the screen.
Olympic Committee Chairman Bach commented: Alibaba has made valuable contributions to the future of the Olympics and sports using cloud computing and AI technology.
In the technical process of the Olympic Games, China's technical strength has now become the center of the stage.
—End—
