Could Google's SR3 be the future of AI Image up-scaling?

Recently Google researchers have presented SR3, a new approach to Super-Resolution a new way to produce sharp images from small, blurry images.

There are many ways to turn a low-resolution image into a higher resolution, bringing back some of the quality and details using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning. But these don't provide great results, until now.

google sr3 image upscaling super resolution
via iterative-refinement.github

There are many ways to turn a low-resolution image into a higher resolution, bringing back some of the quality and details using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning. But these don't provide great results, until now.

Recently Google researchers have presented SR3, a new approach to Super-Resolution a new way to produce sharp images from small, blurry images.

What is Super Resolution?

Super-Resolution (SR) is a group of techniques that produce a super sharp and high-resolution image by combining complementary information from several different images. The measurements to compare the pictures are explored too. In conclusion, it shows the similar consequences of these techniques. Test outcomes showed great pragmatic relevance to the developed algorithm.

How does it work?

The SR3 goal is to produce or restore detail and sharpen the image by increasing its resolution. A simple image editing software uses a standard method to achieve this which is bicubic resampling. Some applications offer a content-aware system that calculates (or guesses) and fills the image with new detail. But what if at some point the detail needed to sharpen the image is missing from the original image?

This is where the working of the new algorithm from Google comes into play. Google SR3 uses a pair of ResNet and PixelCNN which are neural network systems. These neural networks are designed to work cooperatively by turning low-resolution images into higher-resolution versions and also fill the details missing in the lower-resolution images.

Here are some examples from Google in which some 64x64 pixels, down-scaled samples are converted into 1024x1024 pixels.

Google SR3 super-resolution examples
via iterative-refinement.github

These images are so down-scaled that there are very few details present, and need a powerful hint to process and regenerate the image. The research group at Google, introduced SR3, a way to deal with such images, a Super-Resolution that depends on Repeated Refinement. SR3 uses denoising and diffusion probabilistic models to conditional image generation, and then, performs super-resolution through a stochastic denoising process.

The group noticed that "implication begins with pure Gaussian noise and iteratively refines the noisy output utilizing a U-Net model prepared on denoising at different noise levels. SR3 displays solid execution on super-resolution tasks at various amplification factors, on faces and normal pictures."

Google SR3 is the next step to the future of image upscaling without noticeable quality loss, and is a big innovation. SR3 will help many users in many fields. For instance, the police can now use snapshots of low-resolution or blurry CCTV footage, and refine it using SR3 to get a clear face, or a license plate. But that will obviously require a more accurate calculation for it to be reliable enough.

by Talha Shaikhani