KION Online Cinema has requested MTS AI to come up with ways to make movies and TV shows made in different periods more comfortable to watch and to enable skipping the repeating fragments.
SuperResolution – converting videos to 4K
CV engineers from MTS AI created SuperResolution – an AI-powered technology that allows you to increase image resolution with no detriments to its quality. 4K TV owners to watch old movies and TV series with no image distortion can use it. During an independent survey, the technology developers compared an original 1080p video and a video improved to 4K quality and concluded that the improved video was better in several ways. The 4K video was sharper, with brighter colors, and the image appeared more realistic.
Automatic credits skipping
The second part of the solution for KION is automatic skipping of movie credits and intros. To enable users to fast-forward the repeating elements of the videos, you would have to label a lot of video data and run it through the ML model to identify segments with credits and intros. If you did this manually, it would take a lot of time, in the first place, and it would also require additional resources, including money, qualified staff and managerial supervision. Seeking to roll out the automatic credits and intros skipping function, MTS AI decided to use neural networks, a set of micro services and NVidia Tesla graphics cards.
The algorithm devised by MTS AI’s engineers involves a number of steps:
- Decoding an episode – extracting each frame. At this step, we use NVDEC hardware decoders to extract an average of 1,200,000 frames for each season of a series.
- We run these frames through the neural network without extra labeling while learning (unsupervised learning) to convert images into an array of numbers for subsequent handling.
- Each frame of one episode is compared against the other frames from all episodes of the season to identify repeating frames. After the decoding process, we get an average of 60,000 frames per episode, and thanks to high-performance graphics cards it only takes us 4 to 5 minutes to compare and identify repeating frames within one season.
All three steps of processing one season take anywhere between 40 and 60 minutes.
What was the result?
- With the 4K video conversion feature, users can watch movies and TV series with ultimate sharpness and brightness of the image, even if the video was produced in the era of black-and-white cinematography.
- Users of large screens (computers, add-on modules, Smart TVs) now spend more time watching those TV series that permit skipping credits and intros.
- Average time that KION users spend on the online platform has also increased.
