AI image upscaling or Enhance! Enhance!

[f95zoneuser463]

I'm pretty sure other developers here are curious about AI stuff too. I tested "Topaz A.I. Gigapixel" today. A software that uses AI to upscale images up to 600%.

I tried to pick image sources with different "art" styles (source-size in brackets):

• an old very noisy low light 3D CG render from me (5760 x 3240)
• a Jessica Nigri cosplay PHOTO (1600x2400)
• a 1995 "Ghost in the Shell" ANIME poster with text (600 x 889)

It's not visible in the image, but especially with 400% and 600% upscaling I had some bad 1 pixel horizontal line artifacts. The image shows a preview with "normal" upscaling on the left and AI upscaling on the right. All images here are scaled up 200% as you can see in the settings on the rights. The speed is not an issues at all. Even upscaling a 6K source is done in under 1 minutes on a GTX 1070. I did not stop the time. Maybe even < 30 seconds. Judge for yourself:



The software can be tested with 30 day trial time and costs $99.99. You need to create an account.

You must be registered to see the links

(at the bottom) if anyone wants to "play" around.
There is an unlinked offline installer for the windows version if you change the word "online" to "offline" in the link on that page. I tried that just for the lulz and it worked ... I hate online installers.

There is also

You must be registered to see the links

. Haven't tested that one yet.

 

[FranceToast]

Interesting-it looks like it does a lot of sharpening around the text?
Are you thinking whether you could render Daz3D at a low 720p and upscale it to 1920x1080 to save time? Or render at 1080p and upscale with AI to 4k and then back down using conventional scaling?

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Interesting-it looks like it does a lot of sharpening around the text?
Are you thinking whether you could render Daz3D at a low 720p and upscale it to 1920x1080 to save time? Or render at 1080p and upscale with AI to 4k and then back down using conventional scaling?

From what I understand, The current daz beta has a noise filter solution for their renders, and that is using an Neural Net AI to take a noisy image and de noise it and sharpen it. Similar AI is also in the work to upscale things. I have seen some crazy images where someone takes a picture of a soccer game (called foot ball outside of america) in Brazil, and in the upper corner there is a wall behind a person with red paint on it, but the image is so blured out you can't tell there is a person even infront of the wall much less read the text, and AI was able to restore it. The video of this is somewhere posted by the youtuber called 2minutePapers. There is hope that in the future one possible use for AI would be to decompress data, even remove data, but be able to add the data back in after unpackaging. Imagin a 6 GB download reduce to 20 MB

 

[HiEv]

Interesting, but you can see a few spots where it didn't do so well.

For example, in the first image the wood grain in the foreground part of the image was mostly smeared out. And in the second image, Jessica's right eye (on the left in the image) was sharpened very poorly. It also added a "halo" around the hair hanging down in the middle of that image. That said, the "Ghost in the Shell" image did quite well, as you'd expect, since animation and text is made up of a lot of sharp edged lines.

Overall, I'd still say it probably does better than most sharpening tools. Except, perhaps, this one:

 

[Qanim]

I tried this with Daz and had mixed results. A lot of discoloration around edges and some other issues. Works well enough with drawn images though.