Kristen Stewart helps create artificial intelligence system

Los Angeles: Twilight actor Kristen Stewart has co-authored a research, along with an Indian-origin engineer, describing a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that can make movie shots look as though they were painted.

The process relies on machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence. It gave a look of an impressionistic painting to certain shots in the film short, which uses allusive images to follow a man through his day. The shot is about 15 seconds long, and the painting is by Stewart herself.

The technique described in the paper, called neural style transfer, differs from Instagram or Snapchat filters. “What current filters do is, they work with the information in the image. A global operation like Instagram is just a colour lookup,” said lead author Bhautik Joshi, a research engineer at Adobe Systems in the US.

To create effects, Snapchat and Instagram use filters that are based  on rules created by a human being; “if you come across this condition, do that to the image,” Joshi told the Live Science. Style transfer, in this context, works by taking an image and breaking it down into blocks to identify its components and then comparing it to a reference image.