Deep Nostalgia™ is a groundbreaking new photo feature on MyHeritage that allows you to animate the faces of your loved ones in still photos. This new addition to our suite of photo tools produces a realistic depiction of how a person from an old photo could have moved and looked if they were captured on video.
Deep Nostalgia™ uses deep learning algorithms, to produce remarkable results. You can animate any of the faces in your photos to see them move, blink, and smile. It works equally well on black and white photos and photos that were originally taken in color. It also works well on colorized photos and photos whose colors were restored using MyHeritage In Color™. Share the short animated videos of your ancestors smiling, blinking, and turning their heads with your friends and family and see what they think!
It may be lovely to see this photo of your grandmother…
…but seeing her smile at you and look around is a whole different story:
How this technology works?
The remarkable technology for animating photos was licensed by MyHeritage from D-ID, a company specializing in video reenactment using deep learning. MyHeritage integrated this technology to animate the faces in historical photos and create high-quality, realistic video footage.
Deep Nostalgia™ works on all enhanced photos — whether in their original color scheme or colorized or color-restored with MyHeritage In Color™. If your photo was not yet enhanced on MyHeritage, then that is done automatically as part of the process in order to achieve as high-resolution an image as possible. This ensures optimal results for the video animation.
We have several possible sequences of gestures that can be applied to a photo, each originating from a pre-recorded driver video that we’ve prepared in advance. The driver videos guide the movements in the animation so you can see your ancestors smile, blink, and turn their heads.
In the example below, you can see how the recorded driver videos work. On the left, you see the driver video we prepared of Sagih from the MyHeritage Marketing team, and on the right, you see how the driver was applied to a still photo to create the video animation.
We analyze the orientation of the head and the direction of the eyes and choose automatically which driver is best and will be applied to the selected face.
The result is a short, high-quality video animation of an individual face that can smile, blink, and move.