Video communications have become the most common way people communicate nowadays. We all care about how we look on camera. AI-powered Real-time Video Effects are useful to improve our look.
ZEGOCLOUD has developed a deep understanding of users’ needs in different video communications scenarios.
Real-Time Video Effects
In the beginning, technology service providers came up with beatification modules to cater to users’ needs. Those are able to make hosts look great on screen in some ways by smoothing the skin, removing blemishes, etc.
As the industry develops, real-time video communications are integrated into more and more business scenarios. Gen Z has become the main consumer of social media, therefore expecting platforms to offer more personalized and innovative experiences. Traditional beautification modules become inadequate for new use cases.
AI technologies are used to create more advanced real-time video effects to meet market needs. AI-powered Real-Time Video effects modules are more versatile. Indeed, they can be trained for new scenarios using a machine learning framework.
ZEGOCLOUD AI-powered Effects
To help social and entertainment platforms create more attractive products and catch the market trend, ZEGOCLOUD launches ZEGOCLOUD AI Effects. These effects provide face beautification, face shape retouching, face filters, and other advanced real-time video effects. They apply to scenarios such as live streaming, video chat rooms, and video dating. It is an easy-to-integrate and cost-effective solution, helping platforms add new video effects with a very short go-to-market time.
Face beautification
It’s a must-have and standard feature for all social and entertainment platforms.
People use makeup to look polished and express their style in daily life. Likewise, virtual face beautification has become a must-have feature for social platforms to encourage users to show up on video. ZEGOCLOUD’s solution provides the following face beautification effects that can touch up the user’s appearance in a natural way:
Basic face beautification
The solution provides face beautification features to make users look polished and rejuvenated on live video. It includes: skin smoothing, skin tone retouching, eye brightening, teeth whitening, eye bags removal, dark circles removal, blemishes removal, acne removal.
Facial features retouching
IIt adds advanced features that can be used to retouch facial features, including face slimming, chin slimming, nose slimming, eyes enlarging, pupil distance adjustment, mouth shape adjustment. These features are built based on accurate facial key points detection and 3D face modeling. They work especially better for live streaming and short video scenarios where there is only one person on camera.
Virtual makeup
Virtual makeup is an enhancement and extension of basic face beautification capabilities. With accurate facial key points detection, it can precisely apply virtual makeup effects to the user’s lips, eyes, eyebrows, cheek, etc. It can also virtually transform single eyelids into double eyelids. The AI model can be trained to fit the aesthetic taste and styles of different regions and cultures.
AR effects
Sometimes people may want to hide their real looks or look fun. Augmented Reality (AR) effects have come to satisfy these needs. ZEGOCLOUD’s AR effects solution includes various virtual face masks. 2D/3D face stickers of different styles that can help live streamers amuse their audience. The solution provides plenty of basic materials for creating customized AR effects of various styles to match the users’ tastes. It has excellent robustness to work well with complicated backgrounds, changing lighting conditions, and exaggerated user postures.
Intelligent image segmentation
During live streaming, users may want to hide their surroundings for various reasons. ZEGOCLOUD’s solution supports various segmentation methods for high-precision background replacement:
Portrait segmentation
ZEGOCLOUD’s solution algorithms that can precisely detect 19 human body key points (head, neck, legs, arms, etc.) in real-time. Therefore, it can precisely locate the boundary between the human body and the background. Then users can replace it with their favorite virtual location.
Green screen segmentation
Use chroma keying to identify the green screen background and replace it with a virtual background. Green screen background replacement normally has a higher precision. This way, the human portraits will remain clear and sharp after background replacement.
Hair segmentation
Detect and separate the user’s hair from the rest of the image in the video. With these features, users can replace their background with various virtual settings. Among then, a virtual stage or a beautiful scenery image, to make the live video more fun and appealing.
Video filters
The solution provides video filters that can give live video various styles of look and feel. Users can easily change the video filter style by choosing from different themes. Fresh, Japanese style, Soft, Forest, Light effects, and many others.
Challenges of AI-powered Real-Time Effects
AI-powered video effects are great for social platforms to boost user activity. However, building them requires a significant amount of development cost and time.
Social platforms usually choose to use existing AI technologies provided by a third party rather than doing the research and development by themselves. On the other hand, real-time audio and video technologies are also complicated and too expensive to develop in-house. Social platforms may need to cooperate with two or more technology providers. This brings several challenges:
Complex and time-consuming integration
If the video effects SDK and the real-time engagement SDK are provided by two separate providers, it will require a lot of time and effort for the involved parties to communicate and collaborate. The standards and specifications of the two SDKs may be different. and Sometimes it’s hard reconcile and fix the conflicts. Such issues will increase the development cost and slow down the go-to-market process.
High maintenance cost
After the product launch, there will be ongoing maintenance needs. Communication with multiple vendors will also be a challenging issue. A large amount of time and resources will be required to conduct development and testing in case of changes.
Delayed response to production issues
When a technical issue occurs in production, it may require both vendors to work together to fix it. This is because either of the vendors has sufficient knowledge about the technologies from another vendor. For example, it is very likely that an AI vendor doesn’t know how a real-time engagement solution works. Therefore, the production issues cannot be fixed in a timely manner, which may result in customer loss and brand damage.
The above challenges can be overcome by selecting a vendor that can provide both technologies. Nevertheless, few companies can offer both AI-powered computer vision and real-time audio/video capabilities.
Why choose ZEGOCLOUD’s AI Effects solution?
As a global RTC service provider, ZEGOCLOUD truly understands how the issues discussed above affect a platform’s operations through first-hand experiences.
One-stop integration, fast time-to-market
This is a one-stop solution with both the AI video effects and RTC components developed by ZEGOCLOUD. Interfaces in both components are well-designed to fit into each other seamlessly. Therefore, integrating both components into your platform is a much easier task than handling SDKs from different providers. It will save you from difficult troubleshooting and complicated communications and collaboration among multiple parties. In addition, the solution supports all major OS platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS.
One service provider, easy ongoing maintenance
ZEGOCLOUD offers professional technical support with high standards of service level. To ensure customer success, ZEGOCLOUD forms a team of experts with 5 different roles to serve one single client. Clinets need to work with a single vendor for any maintenance issues.
One unified service, swift response
ZEGOCLOUD offers a back-end monitor system called “Prism” that provides real-time, multi-dimensional, and visualized monitoring of your platform’s quality of service. It works 24/7 and raises alarms when issues occur. Furthermore, a one-stop solution also means that you can get timely responses from one single vendor. It is a great deal when solving time-critical production issues.
Outstanding AI computer vision capabilities
With a strategy to apply AI computer vision to real-time audio and video communications, ZEGOCLOUD has assembled a team of experts in multimedia and AI technologies. It has invested a large number of resources into related development and engineering, and ZEGOCLOUD AI Effects is one of the achievements of this endeavor.
The solution provides various smart image rendering features such as face beautification, face detection, and image segmentation, which can be applied to various scenarios such as live streaming, online education, digital photography, etc.
An industry-leading RTC service provider with successful track records
ZEGOCLOUD has a well-established and dedicated team of professionals with extensive experience in RTC and AI computer vision technologies. Our products and solutions have been verified by clients from various fields to be very effective in helping them acquire and retain users and drive revenue growth.
As a global RTC service provider, ZEGOCLOUD covers more than 200 countries and territories and provides one-stop real-time audio and video solutions to businesses in different sectors, including social and entertainment live streaming, online education, video conferencing, gaming, financial services, IoT, and more.
Conclusion
More and more platforms are integrating AI-powered video effects into various scenarios to deliver more engaging real-time video interactions and enhanced user experiences. With ZEGOCLOUD’s one-stop solution, you can easily intergrade AI video effects into real-time video with fast time-to-market, easy maintenance, and outstanding performance.
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