FGVC Video completion in google colab using google drive

Introduction

As the time of this writing (February, 2021) FGVC is one of the best video inpainting projects out there.

The authors did a great work and made it as easy a possible for others to use their video inpaiting tool. They even made a google colab notebook.

However, their tool is command-line based. I struggled a little to use it with my own data in colab. I was not very confortable with the workflow.

• Every time I needed to run it, I needed to clone the tool and download the models again.
• It was hard for me to upload my own data and adjust the tool parameters using the %%bash magic command.
• It was hard for me to se the results after running the video completion.

So I decided to adapt the original google colab notebook for my personal use.

I think it might me useful for others. Check it in nbviewer or in google colab.

What I changed

• I wrote a function to view data data (folders with image files) as animated gif. It allows to easily see the results in google colab.
• The FGVC tool and the deep learning models are saved to google drive, which is mounted at the beginning of the notebook.
• Both input data and results are also saved to google drive.
• The FGVC tool now runs in Python instead of bash.
  • To do that I change the current working directory in Python, import the video_completion_seamless() function from video_completion.py
  • The I simulate the argparse result with a custom dict and call the function
• I also added a little bit of code to measure the execution time of video_completion_seamless() function.

How to use

1. Open FGVC_video_completion.ipynb in google colab.
2. Mount your google drive.
3. (just once) Download the tool and model to your google drive.
   • You can use the commented bash code block, located in cell 2.1. Run it once and comment it again.
   • As february 2021, there is no need to install any package on google colab (pytorch, etc).
4. Activate GPU on colab.
5. Configure the input data at cell 3.3.
   • By default it uses the Tennis demo from FGVC.
6. Run all cells.
7. See the results at cell 3.6.