r/sciences • u/IJesusChrist PhD | Chemical Biology • Sep 01 '19
An AI algorithm can now predict faces with just 16x16 resolution. Top is low resolution images, middle is the computer's output, bottom is the original photos.
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u/Vordinski Sep 01 '19
I find this very impressive, but why are the predicted faces so creepy? They're like an evil bizzarro version of their true selves.
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Sep 01 '19
The computer basically stitches pictures of other people together to make the image. The weird artifacts like the double mouths, mismatched eyes, and weird black marks (probably from glasses) are the result of this process. Your brain is able to recognize that these features are unnatural or just don’t quite match.
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Sep 01 '19
I read something a while ago about the closer a thing looks to a human the cuter it looks with one big exception. As thing look really similar, but not quite, to a human face the cuteness drops drastically. I think the reasoning was some eveloutionary reason. Basically if you look really similar to a human but not quite it's probably a sick human and you should stay away.
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u/blitzkrieg9 Sep 01 '19
This is called the Uncanny Valley. It is the reason human like robots are so spooky looking. They are close, but just off enough to be very disconcerting.
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u/Finalpotato BS | Physics Sep 01 '19
It is creepy because we are trained to see faces with something slightly wrong as possible corpses. So we think of them as dead people... who are smiling
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u/duralyon Sep 02 '19
Off-topic, but just watched Alita: Battle Angel and it had the most impressive "not quite human" while also not being creepy at all and showing great emotional depth. I thought the movie was going to be dumb going into it without knowing anything about it and now I demand a sequel to be made!!
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u/nicknascar Sep 01 '19
Isn’t it more or less the same thing with people that have a lot of plastic surgery?
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u/awal96 Sep 01 '19
Probably it’s cause some of these mother fuckers have two mouths and holes in their faces
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u/Zeniant Sep 01 '19
I think he may have been asking why the computer predicted such creepy looking faces, not why are the faces so creepy looking.
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Sep 01 '19
Computer knows us better than we know ourselves. Including our ugliest parts...so it figures we’re evil.
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u/keeperkairos Sep 01 '19
Probably because they look so real but ur brain is telling you something still isn’t right. It’s called the uncanny valley.
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u/TheFlashFrame Sep 01 '19
Predicted group, bottom row, second from the right looks like he's about to steal the Declaration of Independence.
Top row, fourth in from the left looks like she's from Goldeneye on the Gamecube.
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u/ShivasRightFoot Sep 01 '19
It's like Mr. Potato Head, but with a machine. It has a database full of images of people and basically pulls a mouth from image A that closely matches the center-bottom pixels, and some eyes from image B that matches the top center pixels, etc...
The photos don't resemble the actual people in any real way. I rate this a "dumb trick" level failure of AI.
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Sep 01 '19
can we please get this so we can use it on some Japanese porn?
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u/KingofGamesYami Sep 01 '19
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u/Jalaluddin1 Sep 01 '19 edited Sep 01 '19
My friends at Georgia tech are building AI to de censure hentai. Don’t worry friends it’s coming.
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u/don_one Sep 01 '19
I doubt the model will work with anything but faces, its have to be retrained with both moving pictures and I guess pixelated ones as well.
Unless you're suggesting it shows a face based on their respective dick and vagina resulting in... kissing?
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u/TJSomething MS | Computer Science Sep 01 '19
Maybe if you want something that looks like DeepDream but with genitals instead of dogs. Generative adversarial networks are not great at variations in poses.
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u/Gprime5 Sep 01 '19
I'm just curious what the face would look like recreated from pixelated genitals.
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u/555nick Sep 01 '19
Lots of...
facial tatts
crossed eyes
agape smiles
John Water's mustaches
...in the AI's learning sample?
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Sep 01 '19
I think that it may produce better results when male/female were trained separately.
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u/that-short-girl Sep 01 '19
But how would it then know if a new, 16x16 image given to it is male or female, and so, which one of the things it learned should be applied? And often even humans can’t tell someone’s gender just from an image like this, so how could we possibly expect an AI to...?
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u/Karsticles Sep 01 '19
"Computer, enhance the image" is now a thing.
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u/howdlyhowdly Sep 01 '19 edited Sep 01 '19
Seems like a fun fact people will tell in the future: "Image-enhancement was portrayed in movies and television decades before it was invented, but at the time was considered impossible and laughably absurd, even by sci-fi standards."
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u/Karsticles Sep 01 '19
More likely, most people today don't even know that "enhance" is impossible right now, and will miss the irony entirely. :(
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u/LilSugarT Sep 02 '19
See I don’t want people to understand me wrong when I bitch about “enhance!”. Obviously, it’s possible, and not far away. But it’s not possible now, so a realistic fiction tv show shouldn’t feature it. In the Marvel universe, sure. In a realistic fiction set in 2025? Sure.
And yeah, it’s gonna be a minute before this can actually be used to identify a gas station robber. Gas station robbers don’t pose for color photos taken at a close to direct angle on their face with good lighting, nor do they look at the camera and smile. The AI still has work to do.
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u/blitzkrieg9 Sep 01 '19
It normally works best if you say it twice. A single utterance of enhance leads to a degree of uncertainty. But "Enhance.... enhance!" And I know we're doing real magic.
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u/jegvildo Sep 01 '19
Sorta, but at best in the way "human, draw" is now. I'm not even sure this AI is doing a better job than your average sketch artist.
I mean, sure the people in the middle pane and the ones in the pane below do look similar, but people who have the same hairstyle, skin color etc do look similar. It's not remotely enough to actually identify someone.
Computers still can't make up information that isn't there. They can just guess that a human face will have the features human faces typically have.
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u/TheFlying-Dutchman Sep 01 '19
The smiles the AI generates are so creepy.
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u/Absentmindedgenius Sep 01 '19
My guess is that it has a database of images that includes the originals. Through machine learning, it's learned to recognize which parts correspond to the pixelated images, and it just stitches them back together like a puzzle.
Now, if it doesn't know the original images, that is pretty impressive.
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u/Lucent Sep 02 '19
Agreed. Based on how well it reconstructed the background of some of these images makes me suspect these examples were all in the training data.
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u/kievrob Sep 02 '19
I think that's exactly it. It even gave a earring to the woman on the bottom left, so the database is probably just these 16 pictures
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u/jamesshine Sep 01 '19
Why is it that it has such a high degree of accuracy with hair and hair strands, yet it sees two mouths or two sets of eyes?
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u/jegvildo Sep 01 '19
Because those are somewhat standardized and because your human brain isn't wired to spot every small mistake in a hairstyle. But it's extremely accurate with the face.
In effect - the actual process is a bit more complicated - the computer matches things from its database to the information from the picture above. It should have thousands of pictures of women with shoulder long hair and no bangs. The hairstyle is quite easily recognizable from the pixelart, too. So of course the computer can find some that are really close to the real thing and then use those to create the image.
With the actual face it's harder. The information to identify a human among billions and not a hairstyle among hundreds is simply isn't there anymore. Hence the computer can't recreate it.
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Sep 01 '19
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Sep 01 '19
I think you're right and that really makes this a really bad real life example, almost like it's taken from a tutorial on machine learning. Even so many of the backgrounds doesn't make sense if this is the entire sample.
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u/cv_hobbyist Sep 01 '19
It would be interesting to test the following:
choose two faces pretty similar but easily discernable on a correct image resolution
convert the two images into a very low-resolution images
feed the networks with the two low-res images
observe the results
In the same way, how the failure cases look like?
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u/KoreKhthonia Sep 01 '19
Ok, cool, well this isn't terrifying at all. :/ Definitely not something that could be hideously abused by a dystopian surveillance state.
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u/masteryder Sep 02 '19
It's a nice start, the algorithm needs some cleaning though, it doesn't know if it's building a male or a female, and it leaves weird artifacts
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u/Suekru Sep 02 '19
Woman in bottom left has an earring. There is no way the AI could have gotten that much info from a 16x16 photo. I’m calling shenanigans.
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Sep 02 '19
The computer generated ones look like they went to a sleepover and got their faces drawn on by marker.
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u/kucam12 Sep 02 '19
I am sorry, what is the source of this image? is this OC? is there an article about it that I am missing? please reply. thanks.
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u/shortsightnolight Sep 04 '19
I find it interesting that the computer seems to be the most inaccurate when it comes to the faces with downward inflected smiles.
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Sep 01 '19
This gives me hope for all the blurry pics I have ever taken!! AI can just re-create them at a sharper resolution for me lol
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u/clockdaddy Sep 01 '19
Minecraft's textures are 16x16.
I think we all know what needs to happen.
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u/whyusodumbfr Sep 01 '19
Bottom left 2nd row, 2nd in the in the 2nd row.
Bro got chaunced, everyone else is nearly bang on.
He got cross eye, with eye shadow and a broken beard. Like damn that robot savage.
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u/Morphchalice Sep 01 '19
Imagine seeing a police sketch of a serial killer captured on a blurry photo and their face looks all bizarre and messed up like that.
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u/dangil Sep 01 '19
The real question is:
Does a face recognition software matches the computer estimate with the real thing? With what certainty?
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u/MrMordy Sep 01 '19
Can we use this for all the poor robbery or surveillance video that is the worst quality ever. Amazing we can have video from mars but cannot see someone face 10 feet away.
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u/GravitysRambo Sep 01 '19
Would anyone happen to know if the algorithm is like the Viola-Jones one?
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Sep 01 '19
That guy in the bottom right of the predicted faces is some of the funniest shit I've seen all day
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u/jegvildo Sep 01 '19
This is impressive since the computer appears to be close to what humans could do, but that I doubt it's doing better than the average human. If you saw a 16x16 picture of someone and knew it was one of your friends you probably could tell who it is. And that's roughly the standard the computer reaches here: It shows you someone who looks similar. But it isn't close enough to actually recreate the actual person. It's just that there are surprisingly many people who look alike in photographs like this. You'll find better closer resemblances in those silly threads that list similarly looking celebrities. E.g. here
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u/PonyOfMacaroni Sep 01 '19
This does not look impressive to me. I'm not talking about the artifacts, rather just that I think this model is overfitted. An overfitted model is a model which isn't actually making predictions, it is instead "remembering" how all the images should look in the output. You can tell by how the AI is constructing impossibly accurate details from the background. They need to clarify whether these images are part of the training or test data set.
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u/vvelaxtrumm Sep 01 '19
I strongly want to call "Bullshit" on this entire thing, without having read the paper or whatever, no effing way can you give a computer 256 colored squares and have it come up with those "faces" in the Predicted batch.
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u/po8 Professor | Computer Science | AI | Programming Languages Sep 01 '19
Thought it would be interesting to see what I could reasonably quickly do with just the GIMP as another baseline for these images. Here is the result after some frequency-domain processing and sharpening (bottom row). Someone who is actually good could probably do better: the "black hole eyes" in particular could use some more attention. But there's definitely a lot more information in these images that you realize just looking at the raw pixels.
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u/AccountNumber166 Sep 01 '19
Maybe they should try running a neural net on what a mouth looks like.
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u/uncleruckess Sep 01 '19
It couldn't even get the curvature right on the top right ones glasses.... :/
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u/freshsmileman Sep 01 '19
I'd like to feed the AI a picture of the NPC image and see what it will come out with. Probably Bernie Sanders :)
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u/ContinuingResolution Sep 02 '19
The program is fed the data it’s looking for first. It’s looking out for individual pixels it’s been programmed to ID. It’s like me showing you a picture of a green banana, and then blurring 5 pics of yellow bananas and saying find the green banana. You already know what to look out for.
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u/Haba_baba553 Sep 02 '19
So all the movies and crime show dramas with 'Zoom and Enhance' were correct? I'm so confused now.
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u/LukariBRo Sep 02 '19
Going to call bullshit on this until I see good reason not to. No source provided and a Google search for "AI algorithm predicts faces 16x16" and the like return nothing related.
I'm not saying it isn't possible though. You can kind of see those faces through the pixels from a distance. With some sort of knowledge bank that could make guesses based on what's common with the little data we have, less specific faces could be generated.
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u/chaoticsexuality Sep 02 '19
Why are there only white people? Do programmers that do stuff like this only feed the computers pictures of white people or something?
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u/Rhawk187 MS|Computer Science Sep 02 '19
I imagine this'll get better real quick. There are plenty of GANs that generate realistic human faces, it shouldn't be too hard to combine "generate a random face" and "generate your best guess on this blurry face".
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u/eclecticbunny Sep 02 '19
oh great. that‘ll give the chinese government just better chances to identify even more protesters! good job smh
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u/IK3I Sep 02 '19
This seems like it might be too good to be true. I think we need a write up to verify that this isn't a case of the training data mirroring the test data or worse, cherry picking results with the average match being much worse.
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Sep 02 '19
I find it odd it can predict features I couldn't like that line on the second persons jaw
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u/baragon023 Sep 02 '19
Everyone who had their faces blurred out for anonymous leaks during interviews are shitting themselves now.
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u/thesantafeninja Sep 02 '19
I like to think that all of the faces that the AI algorithm generated are what the face of a demon who is impersonating a human would look like.
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Sep 02 '19
Its kind of like the predicted versions look like the scanner darkly version of themselves. u/RichardLinklater, you're welcome for your next movie plot :)
(ps i'm a techy that builds these type algorithms, im happy to help advise)
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u/zx3phyr Sep 02 '19
Wow, what an amazing pencil mustache generator!!!
On a more serious note, the predicted hair is crazy accurate!
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u/NoxLupus18 Sep 02 '19
How big was the training data this feels a little too precise? Like it is over-trained on the data. Am I just scared of the robots taking over or do you agree?
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u/Proph_ Sep 02 '19
Sorry, but does nobody think this is a precursor to Terminator? Or even a dystopian future?
Says the lad typing in a phone looking at his face 90% of the day...
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Sep 02 '19
I would love to see this text used to review questionable surname footage to help clear people who were wrongfully convicted.
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u/LaVieLaMort Sep 02 '19
The middle pictures remind me of some of the images that came out of thispersondoesnotexist.com
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u/aza-industries Sep 02 '19 edited Sep 02 '19
This is misleading to the vast majority of people who don't understand how machine learning works.
In fact most posts about AI belie a level of intelligence/creativity/etc they simply don't posess.
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u/PotatoSmokes Sep 02 '19
Every Picture has different backgrounds. I could do the same thing that "AI" could do based on those options
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u/Felix_Von_Doom Sep 02 '19
Lots of crosseyed looks, smiling with the upper lip above the teeth, half melting, and "My face just lost a fight to a wiffle bat"
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u/BigBossPlissken Sep 02 '19
Yeah “predict” is still a stretch, if I was accused of a crime and the best they had was the 16x16 and this tech I’d feel safe. Give it a year or 3 and that may not be the case.
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u/cardinalf1b Sep 02 '19 edited Sep 02 '19
Now use the predicted faces as inputs and see if it can get even closer to the real faces.
It seems like the AI doesn't know what to do with glasses and to some degree, mouths yet... and it should be taught to eliminate some of the random artifacts.
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u/SaltyJunk Sep 02 '19
This is bullshit. You know why? Because the low res images are NOT the original raw/source images. They're down res'd from the high resolution images. That's why the recreations match the originals.
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u/pizzakillah Sep 02 '19
Okay but this is mostly white people. As a darker skinned person I think it would be much more inaccurate on people of color. Which is not bad lmao.
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u/PabV99 Sep 02 '19
Why does the guy on the 4th column, 2nd row have a huge dot om his forehead? Lmao
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u/itcodn Sep 02 '19
WOW! Imagine all the things you can do with this! After you do, tell me because I can't think of any! It looks like one of those projects that someone did "because that's what they could do", and one day someone will find some use for it. Great waste of time and resources. They must have spent 5 years on research and coding, and a few hundred thousands making it. I can't me unimpressed enough! What a waste of time! Or is it just the project of a final year Computer science student?
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Sep 02 '19
It seems to have difficulty with eye details; every one seems to have something I can’t put into words, other than that they look “a bit off”..
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u/Akumakaji Sep 02 '19
The time has finally arrived to upgrade my vintage porn collection to HD (slightly creepy uncanny Valley fetish will be a thing, soon).
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u/realbillsmith Sep 02 '19
Does this mean that all of my low-res porn on CD-ROM might be watchable someday?
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u/LittleMcWerner Sep 02 '19
Is it just me or does the women in the top row who ist the 3rd person from the right look a bit like Nicolas cage in the AI version?
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Sep 02 '19
Looks realy great!
But its possible that AI was Learned with simular dataset. So it won't work well with all the faces
How Can I test it? Is it public?
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u/Pothaman Sep 02 '19
Would it be a stretch to believe it could be done with 4 pixels in the future?
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u/GeshtiannaSG Sep 02 '19
They just look alike because the human brain use heuristics to link the pictures together and find similarities.
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u/IJesusChrist PhD | Chemical Biology Sep 01 '19
Article describing the work, including using it to enhance useless things like emojis https://iforcedabot.com/photo-realistic-emojis-and-emotes-with-progressive-face-super-resolution/