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Adobe Seeks AI Motion Patent As Generative Video Race Heats Up

Major tech firms seemingly see generative video as the next frontier of AI.

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Photo via U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

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The company filed a patent application for “generating human motion sequences” using neural networks to analyze and reconstruct them. Adobe wants to make human movements in AI-generated videos and animations seem more natural. 

“Conventional image generation systems suffer from a number of shortcomings with regard to efficiently, flexibly, and accurately generating and reconstructing human motion sequences,” Adobe said in the filing. 

To start, this system uses an encoder, or a neural network-based system that converts data into a format that the model can read, to process motion data taken from a digital scene. The encoder captures feature representations, which are the characteristics of human motion. 

Those feature representations are “discretized”: Rather than representing one fluid motion, each movement is one discrete piece of data. Those discretized motions are stored in a “codebook.” 

When someone wants to generate an animation of human motion, Adobe’s tech basically reverses this process: Discretized movements are picked from the codebook and run through a neural network-based “decoder,” which takes those feature representations and generates them into a video of fluid human motion. 

As Adobe’s main offerings revolve around image and video work, it adds up that the company is seeking patents like these — especially now that major tech firms see generative video as the next frontier of AI. OpenAI, Google, Meta, and TikTok parent company ByteDance have all pushed forward with their own research and offerings in recent months.

Adobe hasn’t been left out of the race. The tech firm announced last week that it would begin rolling out its own text-to-video model, called the Firefly Video Model, to compete with other major players. Though it’s started to open up the tool to those on its waitlist, the company has not given a general release date. 

Though Adobe has a lot of competition in the market for generative video, it may have a few advantages. For one, the company already has a large and dedicated user base, and is largely considered an industry standard for image and video editing. 

The company also claims that its main generative AI offering, Firefly, is commercially viable, as it’s trained on millions of licensed and professional-grade images, rather than relying on internet scraping or non-commercial sources of image data. And as AI image generators like Google, Midjourney, and Stability AI face copyright lawsuits, that may be a point in its favor.