Face Depixelizer Neural Network “Brings Back The Sharpness” Of Photos In Low Resolution, And The Results Are Very Unexpected

A new digital tool built to depixelize photos sounds scary and bad. Another way to remove privacy from the world. But this tool is also being used for a sillier and not terrible purpose: Depixelizng old game characters. The results are…nevermind, this is also a terrible use of this tool.

Face Depixelizer based on “PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models” repository. Given a low-resolution input image, Face Depixelizer searches the outputs of a generative model for high-resolution images that are perceptually realistic and downscale correctly.

A tool created by Alex Damian, Sachit Menon, and Denis Malimonov. It does exactly what you expect with a name like that. Users can upload a pixelated photo of a face and the tool spits out what that person might look like based on algorithms and all that stuff. In the wrong hands, this type of tech can be used to do some bad shit and will make it harder to hide in this world from police and other powerful and dangerous groups.

More: Twitter, Github h/t: kotaku