FotoInMotion project acknowledged by the European Commission’s Innovation Radar initiative

The  European Commission’s Innovation Radar initiative acknowledged the contributions of INESC TEC’s Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM) in the FotoInMotion (FiM) project. This project aims to identify innovations with significant potential, funded by the European Union.

In the current context of mass production of multimedia content, this project – aimed primarily at photojournalism, fashion and festivals, but easily adapted to other application scenarios – has developed a set of processes and tools that enable the automatic and smart transformation of a single photo into a high-quality video, with dynamic storytelling and branding effects.

The tool is available on desktop and mobile versions, allowing audio-visual professionals and the creative public in general to produce a video that tells a story suitable to the context in which the picture was captured – based on static content (photography). More specifically, this tool resorts to computer vision and artificial intelligence techniques, in order to transform a simple photograph into a video, sensitive to the acquisition content, the photograph’s context and the application scenario.

It’s important to point out that this accolade focused on the tasks and results of the project, under the responsibility of INESC TEC’s team of researchers, which enable the creation of different types of metadata relevant to the creative process, integrating different approaches and concepts. Moreover, the solution developed by INESC TEC generates information that allows people to create smart automatic animations, through movements (zoom in/out, pan/tilt) and effects (filters, 3D effects) that adapt to the content and context of the photographs.

For Paula Viana, project coordinator, this acknowledgment “emphasises the results achieved by the CTM team”, which also includes Teresa Andrade and Pedro Carvalho, as well as Luís Vilaça, Inês Teixeira, José Pedro Pinto and Tiago Costa.

The FotoInMotion project began in January 2018, under the motto “Repurposing and enriching images for immersive storytelling through smart digital tools”; it will end in December of 2020, and it is part of the Horizon 2020 community programme.

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC, IPP-ISEP, UP-FEUP, and FCT.