AI can alter the speed of just one object or person in a video

By Chris Stokel-Walker

A neural network can distinguish between people and objects in a video, and speed up or slow down their movements separately while ensuring they smoothly interact with each other. This could be used to dramatise or de-emphasise certain movements or events in a video.

To achieve this, a team at Google and the University of Oxford split out each frame of video into separate layers and taught an AI to identify the people or objects in them.

This neural network homes in on the things in each layer by focusing on their movements. Then it further separates each object …