Video conferencing is one of the most essential means of communication during the global health crisis. Many people use them several times a day during social separation. Video transmission is often very network intensive (both sending and receiving) and may reduce image quality due to video compression. Nvidia has considered this problem and proposed a solution through AI and neural network rendering.
As with all videos streamed over the Internet, from YouTube to Netflix, compression algorithms are used to reduce the required bandwidth so that video calls always take place in real-time, regardless of the speed of the user's ISP. These algorithms use many tricks, from reducing colour fidelity, decreasing the number of frames, and re-interpolating them, to reducing the video resolution. This sometimes makes users feel as if they were in the 1990s.
Nvidia has introduced a new cloud suite of GPU-accelerated AI video conferencing software to enhance streaming video quality and enhance the overall video conferencing experience.
How did it do it? What is Nvidia Maxine?
Nvidia Maxine is a cloud-based AI video streaming platform that enables service providers to bring new AI-based features to more than 30 million web meetings estimated to take place every day. By running a new platform on the company's GPU in the cloud, video conferencing service providers can offer users new AI effects, including view correction, super-resolution, noise reduction, face recognition, and more.
What is one of the best Nvidia Maxine?
End-users can enjoy all the new features without the need for specialized hardware, as data from their video conferencing calls is processed in the cloud rather than on their local devices.
Besides, Nvidia Maxine can dramatically reduce the required bandwidth for video calls. AI software analyzes each person's key points during a call and then intelligently re-animates the face in the video on the other side. With the new AI-based video compression technology running on the Nvidia GPU, developers can reduce video bandwidth consumption by up to a tenth of the requirements of the H.264 video compression standard. Not only does this reduce providers' costs, but it also brings smoother video conferencing to users with less than ideal Internet speeds.
Maxine will also help make video conferencing feel more like a personal conversation, as service providers will be able to leverage Nvidia's research into generative controversial networks (GANs) and offer a host of new features. Some of them involve aligning their faces so that people appear to face each other during a conversation, a vision correction that helps simulate eye contact and animated avatars with realistic animation automatically controlled by their voice and emotional tone in real-time.
Developers can even integrate virtual assistants that use state-of-the-art AI language models for speech recognition, language comprehension, and speech generation with the Nvidia Jarvis SDK. These virtual assistants can take notes, set tasks, and answer questions using human-like voices. At the same time, other AI conversation services, such as translations, closed captions, and transcripts, help ensure that participants know what they are talking about during a call.
Would you like to try a video conference with AI?