Google brings cross-platform AI pipeline framework MediaPipe to the web
Roughly a year ago, Google open-sourced MediaPipe, a framework for building cross-platform AI pipelines consisting of fast inference and media processing (like video decoding). Basically, it’s a quick and dirty way to perform object detection, face detection, hand tracking, multi-hand tracking, hair segmentation, and other such tasks in a modular fashion, with popular machine learning frameworks like Google’s own TensorFlow and TensorFlow Lite.
MediaPipe could previously be deployed to desktop, mobile devices running Android and iOS, and edge devices like Google’s Coral hardware family, but it’s increasingly making its way to the web courtesy WebAssembly, a portable binary code format for executable programs, and XNNPack ML Inference Library, an optimized collection of floating-point AI inference operators. On the graphics and rendering side, MediaPipe now automatically taps directly into WebGL, a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser, such that the browser creates a virtual machine at runtime that executes instructions very quickly.
