Saturday, November 3, 2018

Exploring Super Resolution With Neural Networks: Blade Runner Style

In Blade Runner there is a scene in which Deckard (the protagonist) inspects one of the replicant's (Loean's) photos. The scene features an insane zoom which this blog post estimates the final magnification at a factor of 667.9

While this is science fiction (obviously) there where some breakthroughs in super resolution recently. Basically we use machine learning models to upscale an image without gaining pixelated artefacts.
I used this code to upscale the same photo from the movie using the code that is around using the Lasagne neural network framework.

The top image shows a reflection in a cabinet that is itself a reflection in the round mirror.
The bottom image shows the first zoom in Deckard performs.

Below is the original image (top) and the result (bottom) I got when running the 4 times upscale neural net on the image from Blade Runner. 




If you zoom into the mirror in the reconstructed image (open in new tab to see it in it's original resolution) and you use your imagination, I believe you can see a face in it. I do not believe
it is actually there but that it is a reconstruction artefact, but who knows ... 

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