Prisma is a photo-editing

mobile application A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on de ...

that uses

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and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

to apply artistic effects to transform images. The app was created by Alexey Moiseenkov (russian: Алексей Моисеенков), Oleg Poyaganov, Ilya Frolov, Andrey Usoltsev, and Aram Hardy. It was launched in June 2016 as a free

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

. It debuted on

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

on Apple

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during the first week of June and it became the leading app at the App Store in

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and other neighboring countries. A week after its launch, the app received over 7.5 million downloads. It had over 1 million active users as of July 2016. On 19 July, 2016, the developer launched a

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of the app for Android, which the developers closed a few hours later after receiving feedback from users. This version was released publicly on 24 July, 2016 on

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. In July 2016, the developer announced a video and

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version of the app was under development. On 7 July, 2017, Prisma launched a new app called Sticky which turns

selfies A selfie () is a self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a digital camera or smartphone, which may be held in the hand or supported by a selfie stick. Selfies are often shared on social media, via social networking services such as Face ...

into stickers for sharing to social feeds.

History

The app was created by the team led by Alexey Moiseenkov who also founded the Prisma Labs, based in Sunnyvale, California. Moiseenkov previously worked at

Mail.Ru VK, known as Mail.ru Group until 12 October 2021, is a Russian technology company. It started in 1998 as an e-mail service and went on to become a major corporate figure in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet. VK operates an e-mail s ...

and later resigned from his job to dedicate his time to the development of the app. He has said that the development of the app took one and a half months and the team did not do anything to promote the app. The algorithm that powers the app is based on the open source programming and algorithms behind

DeepArt DeepArt or DeepArt.io was a website that allowed users to create artistic images by using an algorithm to redraw one image using the stylistic elements of another image. with "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" a Neural Style Transfer algorith ...

Features

Users can upload pictures and select a variety of filters to transform the picture with an artistic effect. At launch, the app offered twenty different filters. Additional filters are added daily. In July 2016, Moiseenkov stated that the app will offer forty filters by the end of the month. The image rendering takes place in Prisma Labs' servers and uses a neural network with artificial intelligence to add the artistic effect. The result is delivered back to the user's phone. Unlike other photo editing apps, Prisma renders the image by going through different layers and recreating the image rather than inserting a layer over the image. In August 2016, the iOS version of the app was updated to edit image offline by utilizing the phone's processor for image rendering.

Reception

Downloads

One week after its debut on iOS App Store, the app was downloaded over 7.5 million times and received over 1 million active users. It also became the top listed app in

and its neighboring countries. In the end of July 2016, it was installed over 12.5 million devices with over 1.5 million active users worldwide. According to App Annie, it was listed in the top 10 apps on the App Store in 77 different countries. On the first day of the Android version release, it received over 1.7 million downloads with 50 million pictures processed by the app.

Research and technology

The research paper behind the Prisma App technology is called "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" by Leon Gatys, Alexander Ecker and Matthias Bethge and was presented at the premier machine learning conference: Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in 2015. The technology is an example of a Neural Style Transfer algorithm. This technology used in Prisma was developed independently and before Prisma, and both the university and the company have no affiliation with one another. Further recent work developed by

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, titled Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution by Justin Johnson, Alexandre Alahi and Li Fei-Fei, has also been able to create real-time style transfer through video. The code for the previous papers is available at no charge at

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for research purposes.

References

External links

* {{URL, http://prisma-ai.com/, Official website 2016 software Mobile software Photo software Video software IOS software Android (operating system) software Deep learning software applications