This free AI tool is like a real-life CSI image enhancer

Criminal shows have long been mocked for their use of fantasy technology that could, among other things, enhance pixelated low-resolution images in a way that made them both higher resolution and very clear. While you can scale up an image using something like Photoshop, the quality isn't very good. A new AI-based tool is different, taking low-res images and upscaling them while maintaining quality.

If you upscale a low-res image in Photoshop or any other editing application, the end result is usually blurry and shows a notable loss of details. To get around that, somewhat, the user may apply a filter to sharpen the image, but doing so gives the image a very obvious and mostly unnatural look while offering minimal improvements to the quality.

An AI-based website called Let's Enhance doesn't share that problem. Using neural networks, this website can take a low-res image and increase it to a higher resolution with only minor quality loss. When compared to a traditionally upscaled image, the quality difference is incredible, making it something like a real-life version of the otherwise fake "CSI" technology.

It's easy to see where such technology would be useful. One example is making a large print of an image with a modest resolution. Typically the only way to do this without major quality loss would be printing the image at a small size, then scanning that small print at a high resolution before reprinting the higher-resolution version at a larger size. It is a cumbersome process that wastes time and money.

Let's Enhance increases an image's resolution so that it is 4x larger than its starting size, getting rid of that annoying process. As well, the system is able to detect the blocky artifacts commonly found in JPEG images and remove them automatically, potentially leaving the user with a better quality image than they started out with.

SOURCE: PetaPixel