Anyone who’s familiar with iPhones would have heard about Apple’s Live Photo feature on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. It’s a nifty little bit of technology that blurs the line between a GIF and a short video by recording up to half a second of footage before and after a photo is taken. However, as cool as it sounds, ApGple’s Live Photo never saw widespread support and availability, forcing most people to use third-party apps and convert the format to something more friendly with other platforms such as GIF.
Google has now released their own app that does a similar job but with added bonuses. Announced via a blog post, rather than simply convert the Live Photo, Google’s “Motion Stills” acts as a virtual camera operator and also stabilises the images. The resulting product can be easily shared and viewed on social media.
“With Motion Stills, we provide an immersive stream experience that makes your clips fun to watch and share. You can also tell stories of your adventures by combining multiple clips into a movie montage. All of this works right on your phone, no Internet connection needed.”
Google does this by stabilizing hundreds of millions of videos and creating GIF animations from photo bursts. Their algorithm uses linear programming to compute a virtual camera path that is optimized to recast videos and bursts as if they were filmed using stabilization equipment, yielding a still background or creating cinematic pans to remove shakiness.
One of the challenges Google’s research lab faced was to take technology designed to run distributed in a data center and shrink it down to run even faster on your mobile phone. In the end, they achieved a 40x speedup by using techniques such as temporal subsampling, decoupling of motion parameters, and using Google Research’s custom linear solver, GLOP.
Furthermore, Google also introduced loop optimisation which identifies the best starting and ending points of a Live Photo, so as to create a near perfect looping GIF.
You can download Motion Stills here.
