Playing with AI upscaling (Video2x)

 

I’ve been experimenting with AI upscaling for a little while now. For those unaware, this is a process where a program, trained using a set of example images, will take a picture and try to increase its resolution without compromising on quality. In reality, at least in my case, it’s more about coaxing software into producing acceptable, sometimes even amazing, upscaled images, by adjusting this setting here, or that slider there. We’re a long way from this being completely automated, at least at my price range. The pictures I’ve been using have largely been old family photos, taken by my dad with an early digital camera, but for the sake of my privacy and your interest, this post is focused on something more fun; loading screens from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

I’ve created an example of the result:

 

Upscaling is a quest in search of an image that’s neither blurry, nor airbrushed and smudged beyond recognition. Artwork like these loading images are easier than photos, which start to look wrong very quickly when altered. Faces (especially baby faces, I’ve found) can be distorted into absolute horrors by a well-meaning algorithm. Click that link at your own discretion. While technically a higher resolution picture of my little brother, I don’t think my parents will thank me for this restoration. It will live in my mind until I die.

I’m a lot happier to upscale artwork from Oblivion, as the game already has terrible faces which I am not powerful enough to worsen. Regarding the example above, I’m quite happy with how it came out, even if it was the result of maybe 30 minutes of settings-tweaking. I wanted to avoid spoiling the illuminated manuscript look that characterises Oblivion’s UI, and I knew that being too heavy-handed with the upscaling would make it look more like a painting. The settings I eventually landed on are these:

• Software: Video2x
• Driver: Waifu2x NCNN Vulkan
• Processes: 2
• Scale: 2x
• Noise reduction: 2
• TTA: Off

I won’t pretend to be either an artist or a tech wizard, but I felt these settings produced the best results, without treading all over the original artistic intentions of Oblivion’s UI designers. So I converted them all to the appropriate file format and dropped them into the game directory. After about an hour of plodding about Cyrodiil, the game only crashed once, and I’m pretty sure it was nothing to do with my modifications. So, overall, my most successful upscaling to date. Might even put them up on the Oblivion Nexus, in case there’s any audience at all for this.