A new free tool that restores old photos in seconds

Technology can help you with different tasks and requirements today and one of its last advantages is the ability to restore old photos. Developed by Chinese researchers, a tool created with the help of artificial intelligence can restore time-damaged photos. This is an excellent mechanism to keep some memories alive and come true!

Read the article and learn more about the tool.

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How it works

Everyone has old photos at home, many of which are damaged, smudged, or low-resolution. Since physical photo recovery is difficult and expensive, many people end up losing some memories. However, it is now possible to use an online tool to make the image look brand new. Developed by Tencent, in China, the platform called GFP-GAN, a generative facial adversarial network, is able to correct defects in images without changing the original image.

The program strives to remove fold marks from photos, highlight barely or awkward visual details and bring out the colors of photos, including converting black and white photos to color photos. The method, which is based on the artificial intelligence technology StyleGAN-2, is based on a system of probabilities.

If other tools add elements to the image that make it artificial, the GFP-GAN platform seeks to preserve the naturalness of the images. To do this, he does not add new information to the images and only seeks to clean up the scene. If it is necessary to fill some space in the image, the elements are collected through a database. Even to improve aspects of the face, such as the mouth, nose and eyes.

The application is valid for both old low-resolution photos and digital photos. Since camera photos can be damaged or corrupted at the time of capture, the tool also successfully recovers these photos.

free tool

To use the app, no payment is required. The trial version is available to everyone at GFP-GAN صفحة page or via the free download at GitHub site. The application is open source software, i.e. it can be downloaded and used by anyone. Thus, the creators’ intent is to allow the algorithm to be used in ad hoc tasks that can be incorporated into new software.

The researchers estimate that a more advanced form of the app will be released within a few weeks. Among the improvements included are improved facial recognition, identifying low-resolution elements in the image and better filling spaces.