Researchers have developed an innovative product, AI tool that can turn unrecognizable, blurry facial pictures into convincing computer-generated portraits, in sharper detail than ever before.
In previous times, you can scale an image of a face maximum eight times its original resolution. Traditional approaches take a low-resolution image and 'guess' what extra pixels are needed by trying to get them to match, on average, with corresponding pixels in high-resolution images the computer has seen before. As a result of this averaging, textured areas in hair and skin that might not line up perfectly from one pixel to the next end up looking fuzzy and indistinct.
Seeing this setback, a team of researchers came up with a different approach. Instead of taking a low-resolution image and slowly adding new detail, the system scours AI-generated examples of high-resolution faces, searching for ones that look as much as possible like the input image when shrunk down to the same size. They have found ways to take a handful of pixels and create realistic-looking faces with up to 64 times the resolution, so detailed features such as eyelashes or fine lines.
The team used a tool in machine learning called a "generative adversarial network," or GAN, which are two neural networks trained on the same data set of photos. One network comes up with AI-created human faces that mimic the ones it was trained on, while the other takes this output and decides if it is convincing enough to be mistaken for the real thing. The first network gets better and better with experience until the second network can't tell the difference. From a single blurred image of a face, it can spit out any number of uncannily lifelike possibilities, each of which looks subtly like a different person.
Even given pixelated photos where the eyes and mouth are barely recognizable. The system can convert a 16x16-pixel image of a face to 1024 x 1024 pixels in a few seconds, adding more than a million pixels, akin to HD resolution. Details such as pores, wrinkles, and wisps of hair that are imperceptible in the low-res photos become crisp and clear in the computer-generated versions.
However, the system has yet been able to identify people, the researchers stated at this point, it can not turn an out-of-focus, unrecognizable photo from a security camera into a crystal clear image of a real person. It is only capable of creating new faces that do not exist but look highly realistic.
While the researchers focused on faces as a proof of concept, the same technique could, in theory, take low-res shots of almost anything and create sharp, realistic-looking pictures, with applications ranging from medicine and microscopy to astronomy and satellite imagery. This breakthrough acts as a strong foundation for further innovation research in the near foreseeable future, what will the future hold for AI?
Source: Science Daily
About us: TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,500 engineers.
Visit us at https://www.tmasolutions.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment