Category: Offsites

Posted by Yun-Ta Tsai¹ and Rohit Pandey, Software Engineers, Google Research

Professional portrait photographers are able to create compelling photographs by using specialized equipment, such as off-camera flashes and reflectors, and expert knowledge to capture just the right illumination of their subjects. In order to allow users to better emulate professional-looking portraits, we recently released Portrait Light, a new post-capture feature for the Pixel Camera and Google Photos apps that adds a simulated directional light source to portraits, with the directionality and intensity set to complement the lighting from the original photograph.

Example image with and without Portrait Light applied. Note how Portrait Light contours the face, adding dimensionality, volume, and visual interest.

In the Pixel Camera on Pixel 4, Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a (5G), and Pixel 5, Portrait Light is automatically applied post-capture to images in the default mode and to Night Sight photos that include people — just one person or even a small group. In Portrait Mode photographs, Portrait Light provides more dramatic lighting to accompany the shallow depth-of-field effect already applied, resulting in a studio-quality look. But because lighting can be a personal choice, Pixel users who shoot in Portrait Mode can manually re-position and adjust the brightness of the applied lighting within Google Photos to match their preference. For those running Google Photos on Pixel 2 or newer, this relighting capability is also available for many pre-existing portrait photographs.

Pixel users can adjust a portrait’s lighting as they like in Google Photos, after capture.

Today we present the technology behind Portrait Light. Inspired by the off-camera lights used by portrait photographers, Portrait Light models a repositionable light source that can be added into the scene, with the initial lighting direction and intensity automatically selected to complement the existing lighting in the photo. We accomplish this by leveraging novel machine learning models, each trained using a diverse dataset of photographs captured in the Light Stage computational illumination system. These models enabled two new algorithmic capabilities:

1. Automatic directional light placement: For a given portrait, the algorithm places a synthetic directional light in the scene consistent with how a photographer would have placed an off-camera light source in the real world.
2. Synthetic post-capture relighting: For a given lighting direction and portrait, synthetic light is added in a way that looks realistic and natural.

These innovations enable Portrait Light to help create attractive lighting at any moment for every portrait — all on your mobile device.

Automatic Light Placement
Photographers usually rely on perceptual cues when deciding how to augment environmental illumination with off-camera light sources. They assess the intensity and directionality of the light falling on the face, and also adjust their subject’s head pose to complement it. To inform Portrait Light’s automatic light placement, we developed computational equivalents to these two perceptual signals.

First, we trained a novel machine learning model to estimate a high dynamic range, omnidirectional illumination profile for a scene based on an input portrait. This new lighting estimation model infers the direction, relative intensity, and color of all light sources in the scene coming from all directions, considering the face as a light probe. We also estimate the head pose of the portrait’s subject using MediaPipe Face Mesh.

Estimating the high dynamic range, omnidirectional illumination profile from an input portrait. The three spheres at the right of each image, diffuse (top), matte silver (middle), and mirror (bottom), are rendered using the estimated illumination, each reflecting the color, intensity, and directionality of the environmental lighting.

Using these clues, we determine the direction from which the synthetic lighting should originate. In studio portrait photography, the main off-camera light source, or key light, is placed about 30° above the eyeline and between 30° and 60° off the camera axis, when looking overhead at the scene. We follow this guideline for a classic portrait look, enhancing any pre-existing lighting directionality in the scene while targeting a balanced, subtle key-to-fill lighting ratio of about 2:1.

Data-Driven Portrait Relighting
Given a desired lighting direction and portrait, we next trained a new machine learning model to add the illumination from a directional light source to the original photograph. Training the model required millions of pairs of portraits both with and without extra light. Photographing such a dataset in normal settings would have been impossible because it requires near-perfect registration of portraits captured across different lighting conditions.

Instead, we generated training data by photographing seventy different people using the Light Stage computational illumination system. This spherical lighting rig includes 64 cameras with different viewpoints and 331 individually-programmable LED light sources. We photographed each individual illuminated one-light-at-a-time (OLAT) by each light, which generates their reflectance field — or their appearance as illuminated by the discrete sections of the spherical environment. The reflectance field encodes the unique color and light-reflecting properties of the subject’s skin, hair, and clothing — how shiny or dull each material appears. Due to the superposition principle for light, these OLAT images can then be linearly added together to render realistic images of the subject as they would appear in any image-based lighting environment, with complex light transport phenomena like subsurface scattering correctly represented.

Using the Light Stage, we photographed many individuals with different face shapes, genders, skin tones, hairstyles, and clothing/accessories. For each person, we generated synthetic portraits in many different lighting environments, both with and without the added directional light, rendering millions of pairs of images. This dataset encouraged model performance across diverse lighting environments and individuals.

Photographing an individual as illuminated one-light-at-a-time in the Google Light Stage, a 360° computational illumination rig.

Left: Example images from an individual’s photographed reflectance field, their appearance in the Light Stage as illuminated one-light-at-a-time. Right: The images can be added together to form the appearance of the subject in any novel lighting environment.

Learning Detail-Preserving Relighting Using the Quotient Image
Rather than trying to directly predict the output relit image, we trained the relighting model to output a low-resolution quotient image, i.e., a per-pixel multiplier that when upsampled can be applied to the original input image to produce the desired output image with the contribution of the extra light source added. This technique is computationally efficient and encourages only low-frequency lighting changes, without impacting high-frequency image details, which are directly transferred from the input to maintain image quality.

Supervising Relighting with Geometry Estimation
When photographers add an extra light source into a scene, its orientation relative to the subject’s facial geometry determines how much brighter each part of the face appears. To model the optical behavior of light sources reflecting off relatively matte surfaces, we first trained a machine learning model to estimate surface normals given the input photograph, and then applied Lambert’s law to compute a “light visibility map” for the desired lighting direction. We provided this light visibility map as input to the quotient image predictor, ensuring that the model is trained using physics-based insights.

The pipeline of our relighting network. Given an input portrait, we estimate per-pixel surface normals, which we then use to compute a light visibility map. The model is trained to produce a low-resolution quotient image that, when upsampled and applied as a multiplier to the original image, produces the original portrait with an extra light source added synthetically into the scene.

We optimized the full pipeline to run at interactive frame-rates on mobile devices, with total model size under 10 MB. Here are a few examples of Portrait Light in action.

Portrait Light in action.

Getting the Most Out of Portrait Light
You can try Portrait Light in the Pixel Camera and change the light position and brightness to your liking in Google Photos. For those who use Dual Exposure Controls, Portrait Light can be applied post-capture for additional creative flexibility to find just the right balance between light and shadow. On existing images from your Google Photos library, try it where faces are slightly underexposed, where Portrait Light can illuminate and highlight your subject. It will especially benefit images with a single individual posed directly at the camera.

We see Portrait Light as the first step on the journey towards creative post-capture lighting controls for mobile cameras, powered by machine learning.

Acknowledgements
Portrait Light is the result of a collaboration between Google Research, Google Daydream, Pixel, and Google Photos teams. Key contributors include: Yun-Ta Tsai, Rohit Pandey, Sean Fanello, Chloe LeGendre, Michael Milne, Ryan Geiss, Sam Hasinoff, Dillon Sharlet, Christoph Rhemann, Peter Denny, Kaiwen Guo, Philip Davidson, Jonathan Taylor, Mingsong Dou, Pavel Pidlypenskyi, Peter Lincoln, Jay Busch, Matt Whalen, Jason Dourgarian, Geoff Harvey, Cynthia Herrera, Sergio Orts Escolano, Paul Debevec, Jonathan Barron, Sofien Bouaziz, Clement Ng, Rachit Gupta, Jesse Evans, Ryan Campbell, Sonya Mollinger, Emily To, Yichang Shih, Jana Ehmann, Wan-Chun Alex Ma, Christina Tong, Tim Smith, Tim Ruddick, Bill Strathearn, Jose Lima, Chia-Kai Liang, David Salesin, Shahram Izadi, Navin Sarma, Nisha Masharani, Zachary Senzer.

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¹  Work conducted while at Google. ↩

Posted by Ivan Grishchenko and Valentin Bazarevsky, Research Engineers, Google Research

Real-time, simultaneous perception of human pose, face landmarks and hand tracking on mobile devices can enable a variety of impactful applications, such as fitness and sport analysis, gesture control and sign language recognition, augmented reality effects and more. MediaPipe, an open-source framework designed specifically for complex perception pipelines leveraging accelerated inference (e.g., GPU or CPU), already offers fast and accurate, yet separate, solutions for these tasks. Combining them all in real-time into a semantically consistent end-to-end solution is a uniquely difficult problem requiring simultaneous inference of multiple, dependent neural networks.

Today, we are excited to announce MediaPipe Holistic, a solution to this challenge that provides a novel state-of-the-art human pose topology that unlocks novel use cases. MediaPipe Holistic consists of a new pipeline with optimized pose, face and hand components that each run in real-time, with minimum memory transfer between their inference backends, and added support for interchangeability of the three components, depending on the quality/speed tradeoffs. When including all three components, MediaPipe Holistic provides a unified topology for a groundbreaking 540+ keypoints (33 pose, 21 per-hand and 468 facial landmarks) and achieves near real-time performance on mobile devices. MediaPipe Holistic is being released as part of MediaPipe and is available on-device for mobile (Android, iOS) and desktop. We are also introducing MediaPipe’s new ready-to-use APIs for research (Python) and web (JavaScript) to ease access to the technology.

Top: MediaPipe Holistic results on sport and dance use-cases. Bottom: “Silence” and “Hello” gestures. Note, that our solution consistently identifies a hand as either right (blue color) or left (orange color).

Pipeline and Quality
The MediaPipe Holistic pipeline integrates separate models for pose, face and hand components, each of which are optimized for their particular domain. However, because of their different specializations, the input to one component is not well-suited for the others. The pose estimation model, for example, takes a lower, fixed resolution video frame (256×256) as input. But if one were to crop the hand and face regions from that image to pass to their respective models, the image resolution would be too low for accurate articulation. Therefore, we designed MediaPipe Holistic as a multi-stage pipeline, which treats the different regions using a region appropriate image resolution.

First, MediaPipe Holistic estimates the human pose with BlazePose’s pose detector and subsequent keypoint model. Then, using the inferred pose key points, it derives three regions of interest (ROI) crops for each hand (2x) and the face, and employs a re-crop model to improve the ROI (details below). The pipeline then crops the full-resolution input frame to these ROIs and applies task-specific face and hand models to estimate their corresponding keypoints. Finally, all key points are merged with those of the pose model to yield the full 540+ keypoints.

MediaPipe Holistic pipeline overview.

To streamline the identification of ROIs, a tracking approach similar to the one used for the standalone face and hand pipelines is utilized. This approach assumes that the object doesn’t move significantly between frames, using an estimation from the previous frame as a guide to the object region in the current one. However, during fast movements, the tracker can lose the target, which requires the detector to re-localize it in the image. MediaPipe Holistic uses pose prediction (on every frame) as an additional ROI prior to reduce the response time of the pipeline when reacting to fast movements. This also enables the model to retain semantic consistency across the body and its parts by preventing a mixup between left and right hands or body parts of one person in the frame with another.

In addition, the resolution of the input frame to the pose model is low enough that the resulting ROIs for face and hands are still too inaccurate to guide the re-cropping of those regions, which require a precise input crop to remain lightweight. To close this accuracy gap we use lightweight face and hand re-crop models that play the role of spatial transformers and cost only ~10% of the corresponding model’s inference time.

	MEH	FLE
Tracking pipeline (baseline)	9.8%	3.1%
Pipeline without re-crops	11.8%	3.5%
Pipeline with re-crops	9.7%	3.1%

Hand prediction quality.The mean error per hand (MEH) is normalized by the hand size. The face landmarks error (FLE) is normalized by the inter-pupillary distance.

Performance
MediaPipe Holistic requires coordination between up to 8 models per frame — 1 pose detector, 1 pose landmark model, 3 re-crop models and 3 keypoint models for hands and face. While building this solution, we optimized not only machine learning models, but also pre- and post-processing algorithms (e.g., affine transformations), which take significant time on most devices due to pipeline complexity. In this case, moving all the pre-processing computations to GPU resulted in ~1.5 times overall pipeline speedup depending on the device. As a result, MediaPipe Holistic runs in near real-time performance even on mid-tier devices and in the browser.

Phone	FPS
Google Pixel 2 XL	18
Samsung S9+	20
15-inch MacBook Pro 2017	15

Performance on various mid-tier devices, measured in frames per second (FPS) using TFLite GPU.

The multi-stage nature of the pipeline provides two more performance benefits. As models are mostly independent, they can be replaced with lighter or heavier versions (or turned off completely) depending on the performance and accuracy requirements. Also, once pose is inferred, one knows precisely whether hands and face are within the frame bounds, allowing the pipeline to skip inference on those body parts.

Applications
MediaPipe Holistic, with its 540+ key points, aims to enable a holistic, simultaneous perception of body language, gesture and facial expressions. Its blended approach enables remote gesture interfaces, as well as full-body AR, sports analytics, and sign language recognition. To demonstrate the quality and performance of the MediaPipe Holistic, we built a simple remote control interface that runs locally in the browser and enables a compelling user interaction, no mouse or keyboard required. The user can manipulate objects on the screen, type on a virtual keyboard while sitting on the sofa, and point to or touch specific face regions (e.g., mute or turn off the camera). Underneath it relies on accurate hand detection with subsequent gesture recognition mapped to a “trackpad” space anchored to the user’s shoulder, enabling remote control from up to 4 meters.

This technique for gesture control can unlock various novel use-cases when other human-computer interaction modalities are not convenient. Try it out in our web demo and prototype your own ideas with it.

In-browser touchless control demos. Left: Palm picker, touch interface, keyboard. Right: Distant touchless keyboard. Try it out!

MediaPipe for Research and Web
To accelerate ML research as well as its adoption in the web developer community, MediaPipe now offers ready-to-use, yet customizable ML solutions in Python and in JavaScript. We are starting with those in our previous publications: Face Mesh, Hands and Pose, including MediaPipe Holistic, with many more to come. Try them directly in the web browser: for Python using the notebooks in MediaPipe on Google Colab, and for JavaScript with your own webcam input in MediaPipe on CodePen!

Conclusion
We hope the release of MediaPipe Holistic will inspire the research and development community members to build new unique applications. We anticipate that these pipelines will open up avenues for future research into challenging domains, such as sign-language recognition, touchless control interfaces, or other complex use cases. We are looking forward to seeing what you can build with it!

Complex and dynamic hand gestures. Videos by Dr. Bill Vicars, used with permission.

Acknowledgments
Special thanks to all our team members who worked on the tech with us: Fan Zhang, Gregory Karpiak, Kanstantsin Sokal, Juhyun Lee, Hadon Nash, Chuo-Ling Chang, Jiuqiang Tang, Nikolay Chirkov, Camillo Lugaresi, George Sung, Michael Hays, Tyler Mullen, Chris McClanahan, Ekaterina Ignasheva, Marat Dukhan, Artsiom Ablavatski, Yury Kartynnik, Karthik Raveendran, Andrei Vakunov, Andrei Tkachenka, Suril Shah, Buck Bourdon, Ming Guang Yong, Esha Uboweja, Siarhei Kazakou, Andrei Kulik, Matsvei Zhdanovich, and Matthias Grundmann.