There is a saying that a photo is worth a thousand words. But there are many cases where some of the details of a given photo may not be entirely clear. The first thought that comes to mind is enhancement. This basically means enhancing the quality of the photo in order to make sense of what is in it. It’s also a great way of deciphering the finer details of a photograph that may not be easily noticeable in poor quality pictures.
This actually takes us to the fascinating CSI TV show. Remember how some laid-back tech guru in the show used a software to enhance a crime scene photo and aha! The clue that everyone was looking for finally reveals itself. Well, although for far too long we have always thought that this is the kind of stuff you only see in a movie, things might just start to change all thanks to artificial intelligence.
Researchers are already adopting neural networks and technologies for machine learning to enable computers to fill in the missing details in a given photo. There are a number of consumer-ready sites that are already making this technology available for the regular users.
One site we have come across is called Let’s Enhance. It’s a new website and you can easily recognize it by the simple drag-and-drop interface that greets you on the homepage. The site allows you to upload the picture you want to enhance. The system will process it and a downloadable photo that has been enlarged four times will be presented. The results are quite amazing. In comparison to the simple Photoshop interpolation method, it’s way better.
In some of the photos that we managed to enlarge using the site, we noticed that the clarity and quality of the enhanced pictures is very high. According to the founders of this website, the system uses machine learning frameworks including EDSR and SRGAN to massively scale up the quality of the images.
The biggest challenge when enhancing and enlarging photos is to retain or improve the initial quality. For example, when you use simple Photoshop Interpolation, the software basically replaces missing pixels with an exact copy of the pixels around them. This significantly affects the authenticity of the enhanced image. But Let’s Enhance gives you a completely different experience. The image quality and its authenticity are far more superior.
This is a new technology. So far it’s doing a great job and it’s possible that it could get better over the years. However, the days we used to think that photo enhancement is only done in movies and TV shows are gone. Photo enhancement is here and it’s only a matter of time before this technology becomes readily available for many more consumers around the world.
