Accept it or not, most of us today are obsessed with pixel peeping.
Pinching and zooming to see how sharp your images are or how better is your camera or smartphone
than your friends’.
But let me tell you what, what if I told you that hey, no matter what the resolution of your
camera is, no matter what the megapixel is, I can double or triple that.
You give me a low res image, I can turn that into an HD.
Let me know down in the comments below, would you believe me?
Well you have no reason to believe me.
But you have all the reasons to believe Google.
Yes, it's possible now.
Enhancing the resolution has long been the stuff of TV fantasy but now you can actually
zoom into a picture, pinch in to a picture, without any loss in picture quality.
So Google has unveiled a brand new prototype software that exactly does that which it calls
RAISR, Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution.
Practically up until now, it was impossible for us to invent details digitally but Google
is pitching Artificial Intelligence in to do that for us.
. Mind you, this is totally different from the
traditional methods of upscaling.
But How does Google do that?
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Do you remember those old movies in which the hero had a blurred out image of the supervillain
or say the culprit and he headed up to the computer and the computer cleaned up the image
pixel by pixel and made it superfine or at least identifiable?
For many of us it was impossible to think of a software which could pull this thing
off in reality.
But, let me tell you something.
It's 21st century and Google has really made it's mark.
Till now, yes, you could technically increase the resolution of the image but that made
no sense because eventually the final images would turn out to be blurred when you increase
the resolution.
Why?
Because computers cannot invent details.
How can they?
It's a computer.
How can it guess what's in those details.
What texture is there in those details.
It cannot do that.
The computer simply copied the neighboring pixels and used it to recreate the substance
which significantly increased the resolution but only in numbers.
So, this is an example of typical upscaling.
As you can see that there is a lack of vivid details in the upscaled photograph.
But Google’s RAISR software uses machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to adapt
its methods to the kind of image it's looking at.
The software pays close attention to what are called "edge features" — or, the parts
of an image which indicate the edge of an object.
So basically what it does, it takes the low resolution image, uses a cheap upsampler to
upscale the image and then uses machine language to analyse both of them, and create a high
resolution image.
In this example, as you can see, going from the original low-res file, to the kind of
result you would get with any upsampler software like Photoshop, any Bicubic upscaler for instance
- to the result of the raisr system on the right.
Now Google isn’t the only company working on this technology, earlier this year, Twitter
bought a startup called Magic Pony, which kind of did the same upscaling or upsampling
but for video, which indeed is a much harder task.
What we wait for right now is to how this technology will apply to our everyday lives.
Obviously it will make the smartphone cameras usable for semi-professional purposes.
Also, Let's not forget that how important this kind of work will be in preserving memories;
a lot of early digital cameras and phone cameras – not to mention, for example, security
cameras – simply didn't have the resolution that today's big screens require.
Wouldn't it be great to be able to enhance those images back to a much sharper picture?
It seems as if in future we will get over the race for Mega Pixels and low-resolution
imagery will become more prevalent with machine learning deployed to fill in the gaps.
By the way, what do you think is the future of Artificial Intelligence, do leave it down
in the comments below.
And also, if you haven't subscribed yet, please do consider subscribing and hit the subscribe
button to get more videos like these in future.
So guys, that’s all for today.
If you are interested in a software makes your plane landscape images go Wow! and changes
dramatically, do consider watching my review of the new Landscape Pro.
Also, Google has been digging AI for quite a while.
Do check out Google latest jaw dropping experiments you can involve in.
In one of the experiments they let you draw and the image and the Artificial Intelligence
guesses what you are drawing.
And I’m really amazed!
Thank you so much for watching and I’ll see you guys in my next video.
Till then, stay tuned and keep creating.