Nvidia Unveils Maxine, Its AI-Powered Video Conferencing Platform

by Kay Lee

Now that remote working and video calls are an integral part of quite a lot of people’s lives during the pandemic, Nvidia announced its new cloud-AI video-streaming platform called Maxine, which promises to outrun its competitors with the help of artificial intelligence. Nvidia claims that this platform can solve some of the most common problems of video calling.

The platform provides developers with a suite of Nvidia GPU-accelerated artificial intelligence software to improve video quality. AI features that this cloud-native solution offers and that can be used in different video conferencing services are face alignment and gaze correction (Maxine recognizes faces and facial expressions of people using AI and readjust them so that they always look straight into the camera), super-resolution, face re-lighting, background noise removal, and real-time translation.

As all data from Nvidia Maxine are processed in the cloud, users can enjoy the features on any device, including phones, tablets, and computers, without any specialized hardware.

“Video conferencing is now a part of everyday life, helping millions of people work, learn and play, and even see the doctor,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Accelerated Computing at Nvidia. “Nvidia Maxine integrates our most advanced video, audio and conversational AI capabilities to bring breakthrough efficiency and new capabilities to the platforms that are keeping us all connected.”

According to Nvidia, apps made on Maxine significantly reduce video bandwidth usage with AI video compression. To reduce bandwidth, Nvidia uses artificial intelligence to analyze “key facial points” and then re-animate the face in the video instead of streaming all of the pixels for the face.

“Using this new AI-based video compression technology running on NVIDIA GPUs, developers can reduce video bandwidth consumption down to one-tenth of the requirements of the H.264 streaming video compression standard. This cuts costs for providers and delivers a smoother video conferencing experience for end users, who can enjoy more AI-powered services while streaming less data on their computers, tablets and phones,” reads Nvidia’s statement.

Starting this week, software partners, service providers, and developers can apply for early access to the platform.

Recently, Nvidia also released a new line of graphic cards, namely the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.