It’s one of the biggest cliches in crime and science fiction: An investigator pulls up a blurry photo on a computer screen and asks for it to be enhanced, and boom, the image comes into focus, revealing some essential clue. It’s a wonderful storytelling convenience, but it’s been a frustrating fiction for decades — blow up an image too much, and it becomes visibly pixelated. There isn’t enough data to do more.
“If you just naïvely upscale an image, it’s going to be blurry. There’s going to be a lot of detail, but it’s going to be wrong,” said Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at Nvidia.
Recently, researchers and professionals have begun incorporating artificial intelligence algorithms into their image-enhancing tools, making the process easier and more powerful, but there are still limits to how much data can be retrieved from any image. Luckily, as researchers push enhancement algorithms ever further, they are finding new ways to cope with those limits — even, at times, finding ways to overcome them.
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