Many YouTubers change their video backgrounds to set a certain mood or simply to hide their messy apartment, but not every creator has the editing skills or the living space to use a green screen to do that. To solve this problem, Google LLC’s engineers have turned to their duct tape of choice: artificial intelligence.

Google software engineers Valentin Bazarevsky and Andrei Tkachenka wrote on the Google Research blog last Thursday that the company has developed an AI that can replace video backgrounds in real time, no green screen required. Even better, the engineers said that the AI is suitable for mobile phones.

“Our new segmentation technology allows creators to replace and modify the background, effortlessly increasing videos’ production value without specialized equipment,” Bazarevsky and Tkachenka said.

Google’s researchers trained the AI using a dataset of tens of thousands of images, each of which had been annotated to include “pixel-accurate locations of foreground elements such as hair, glasses, neck, skin, lips.” The neural network used this data to teach itself how to isolate and replace video backgrounds without affecting the people in the foreground — well, mostly. According to Google, the AI is about 98 percent accurate under ideal conditions, but that number drops to 94.8 percent when running on an iPhone 7 or Pixel 2. As a result, the AI’s background replacement quality not quite on par with a green screen, but Google’s technique does not require editing skills or extra work.

The AI-powered background effects are available now through YouTube Stories, an Instagram-like video format that is in limited beta for the YouTube mobile app. After uploading a video through the app, users can scroll through a number of different background choices, which are swapped out in real time during playback.

YouTube creators may be the first to play with Google’s new background replacement feature, but the company’s AI opens up new possibilities for plenty of other augmented reality apps. Bazarevsky and Tkachenka said that Google will continue developing the AI and will eventually roll it out to the company’s other AR services.

Google is not the only tech giant using AI to build more powerful AR features. Facebook Inc. revealed a project in January that works almost exactly like YouTube’s new service, but in reverse. Rather than identifying a replacing a video’s background, Facebook’s AI identifies and replaces a person’s entire body.

Like Google, Facebook Inc. also focused on getting its AI to work on mobile devices, which have become a major battleground for AI development. Several tech giants, such as Arm Holding plc, have even started creating mobile chips that are specifically designed for AI.

Photos: YouTube