Google’s Allo app introduces AI-powered illustrated selfie feature

Google is introducing a feature in Allo that uses a combination of neural networks and the work of artists to turn your selfie into a personalised sticker pack. Simply snap a selfie, and it’ll return an automatically generated illustrated version of you, on the fly, with customization options to help you personalise the stickers even further.

In its research blog, Google said, "The traditional computer vision approach to mapping selfies to art would be to analyze the pixels of an image and algorithmically determine attribute values by looking at pixel values to measure colour, shape, or texture. However, people today take selfies in all types of lighting conditions and poses. And while people can easily pick out and recognise qualitative features, like eye colour, regardless of the lighting condition, this is a very complex task for computers. When people look at eye colour, they don’t just interpret the pixel values of blue or green, but take into account the surrounding visual context."

The Google engineers then explored how they could enable an algorithm to pick out qualitative features in a manner similar to the way people do, rather than the traditional approach of hand coding how to interpret every permutation of lighting condition, eye colour, etc. "While we could have trained a large convolutional neural network from scratch to attempt to accomplish this, we wondered if there was a more efficient way to get results, since we expected that learning to interpret a face into an illustration would be a very iterative process," the engineers added.

Engineers who worked on the feature used existing general-purpose computer vision technology from Google. Another application of the technology might be a security camera that accurately recognizes faces when it’s dark outside.