Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn. Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.
Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
51–60 of 276 posts
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#52The example video clips in the post look nothing like me and my team's view when using the new feature. Most of the time half of our hair gets blurred or replaced and hand gestures will cause either our hands or head to disappear.
I'm wondering why they didn't just use standard CV techniques like background subtraction? Does their technique work with a dynamic background as well?
I’ve done some work in this space - subtraction doesn’t perform well when other motion is present, whereas if you use pose / body detection you can ignore other bodies in view (i.e, the toddler running across the room).
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#53Sony released some software a couple of months ago that lets you use most of their DSLRs as webcams with USB. My goodness, paired with a fast lens, what a difference to my MacBook webcam, even with these ml blurred backgrounds! It's only 720p and around 15fps but real shallow dof, very little sensor noise, autofocus works. Well worth trying if you have a Sony camera from the last few years. Sensor size and good optic…
Canon did too! Definitely a huge upgrade over a typical webcam. I'm using my old T1i which can be had for less than $50 these days, plus you can pick up a 18-55mm kit lens for like $20 and the video quality blows away any webcam, especially for the same price. Also recommend battery->power adapter.
What is the canon software called ?
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#54I wish my coworkers would stop using background blur.
It sucks and it’s distracting.
Your hair and hands pop in and out of blur. Sometimes part of your face will blur.
I don’t care if your workspace is messy or your kid walks in the room. I do care that we’re all being distracted by your weirdly blurred hair and hands.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry not everyone on the planet looks like you
They seem to be lamenting that they now notice skin color (due to all the racial essentialism of the last N years) where they used to not notice.
I think the issue is that, were it not for everyone being forced to notice, everyone was defaulting to caring so little that we just used the people around us or who we had existing connections with (for demos, training data, employees... whatever), and everything was horribly biased due to numerous reasons. So, while before you weren't being forced to pay attention, everything was more racist than now, where you are being forced to actually make an effort to be anti-racist.
To put this into a programming metaphor, to me this is like being triggered by someone going out of their way to add a buffer overflow check due to a bunch of people spending the last decade screaming about buffer overflow security issues. Sure, before you didn't have to notice, but your code was probably also horribly insecure; now, everyone gets angry if you don't take at least minimal precautions, and people are even advocating that you use more secure languages from the start (to the point of questioning your architectural decisions if you don't), so you are being forced to pay attention--and sure, it seems a bit annoying and like extra work that a bunch of fanatics are foisting on you, and if someone had taken the time for their code to be secure before you might not have noticed (I mean, you weren't ever against security) but now it is screaming at you "this is because of those annoying security people rubbing our noses in our buffer overflows" so you get angry because this is taking time away from "getting the real work done" on your product--but the reality is that your code used to have glaring security issues that affected people who weren't you, and it sucked; everyone is better off for you paying attention now, and maybe one day we can fix the systemic problem and no one will have to put in such obvious effort to avoid being part of the problem, but we clearly aren't there yet. Being angry about this just comes off as not giving a shit about security: you didn't notice these checks before, because the code was just as good to you, for the criteria you were bothering to pay attention to, without the checks as it would have been with them, and the whole point is that that wasn't true... it was actually much worse; similarly, being angry about people making active efforts to have diversity in product advertising frankly just makes you come off as not giving a shit about minority representation :/.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least for background blur the latency there is enough to make it almost unusable: easily over 100ms. This is with latest stable Chrome on a relatively recent Ryzen/Nvidia system. Maybe background replacement will do better once it rolls down to regular Google Meet (too lazy to log into my Google Apps Suite Workspace) :-) However, everything else about Google Meet is great and I wish I could make all my Zoom friend…
> However, everything else about Google Meet is great and I wish I could make all my Zoom friends switch. is it _better_ than zoom tho? I my experience, I don't see much of an improvement worth switching.
In my experience, Meet is far far better than the Zoom webclient. And I refuse to install the zoom desktop application.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#57Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn. Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.
Also stop telling me my camera is disabled. Like, I know it is, I disabled it for a reason.
COVID taught me that video conferencing is so much more demanding than phone conference bridges.
The best conferencing solutions I’ve used to shame those not using video
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canon did too! Definitely a huge upgrade over a typical webcam. I'm using my old T1i which can be had for less than $50 these days, plus you can pick up a 18-55mm kit lens for like $20 and the video quality blows away any webcam, especially for the same price. Also recommend battery->power adapter.
What is the canon software called ?
EOS Webcam Utility
https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/se...
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can vouch for this. I haven’t really needed the background blur feature personally, but I’ve tried it and both myself, colleagues, and friends — pretty much everyone I’ve talked to that has used it — loathe Google Meet’s background blur, and prefer Zoom’s by far. In my experience, it doesn’t completely cover the background most of the time, and if you move at all, as you point out, it can’t keep up. Kind of funny t…
"Turns out our training set was comprised entirely of backdrops from Google HQ. Sorry everyone else!"
Everyone is wfh @ Google
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#60They mention SIMD support, but It's unclear to me in what capacity the GPU is leveraged. The hair segmentation example on the MediaPipe webpage suggests it's evaluating the graph on the GPU though.