Fast.ai Students Show Us How to De-Crapify

Some very intriguing image and video filtering and improvement results, with lots of images and audio.   Join their newsletter.

From  Fast.AI
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Decrappification, DeOldification, and Super Resolution
In this article we will introduce the idea of “decrappification”, a deep learning method implemented in fastai on PyTorch that can do some pretty amazing things, like… colorize classic black and white movies—even ones from back in the days of silent movies, like this ....

The genesis of DeOldify

DeOldify was developed at around the same time that fast.ai started looking at decrappification, and was designed to colorize black and white photos. Jason Antic watched the Spring 2018 fast.ai course that introduced GANs, U-Nets, and other techniques, and wondered about what would happen if they were combined for the purpose of colorization. Jason’s initial experiments with GANs were largely a failure, so he tried something else - the self-attention GAN (SAGAN). His ambition was to be able to successfully colorize real world old images with the noise, contrast, and brightness problems caused by film degradation. The model needed to be trained on photos with these problems simulated. To do this, he started with the images in the ImageNet dataset, converted them to b&w, and then added random contrast, brightness, and other changes. In other words, he was “crappifying” images too!

The results were amazing, and people all over the internet were talking about Jason’s new “DeOldify” program. Jeremy saw some of the early results and was excited to see that someone else was getting great results in image generation. He reached out to Jason to learn more. Jeremy and Jason soon realized that they were both using very similar techniques, but had both developed in some different directions too. So they decided to join forces and develop a decrappification process that included all of their best ideas. ... "