As a little side-project, I have been working on putting the artificial neural networks of AI Gigapixel to the test and having them upscale another favorite thing of mine… Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9).
Just like Final Fantasy 7, of which I am upscaling the backgrounds, textures, and videos in Remako mod, DS9 was also relegated to a non-HD future. While the popular Original Series and The Next Generation were mostly shot on film, the mid 90s DS9 had its visual effects shots (space battles and such) shot on video.
While you can rescan analog film at a higher resolution, video is digital and can’t be rescanned. This makes it much costlier to remaster this TV show, which is one of the reasons why it hasn’t happened.
Fascinating methodology, and the results speak for themselves. Amazing work.
Now more people will think that the police drama “Enhance!” cliche is real and can count as evidence.
Great.
Edit:
From the AI Gigapixel website:
This is some serious Telsa autopilot level of deception right there.
The other annoying thing is not showing the comparison images at the same size…. I want to see a comparison between scalar upscaled 4x480p and the AI scaled up 1080p.
cb88,
Exactly what I was thinking too. Machine learning might work well for this, but he really needs to show his machine learning upscaling versus non-machine learning upscaling to illustrate the value that machine learning adds over more conventional techniques. Without doing this, we can’t tell one way or the other whether what he has is useful.
I like the results. While TNG is my favorite, I do think DS9 is the better show.
Definitely related is an Engadget article about the poor job 20th Century Fox did remastering Babylon 5.