Restoring and inpainting the visual memories that are present, but often impaired, in old photos remains an intriguing but unsolved research topic. Decades-old photos often suffer from severe and commingled degradation such as cracks, defocus, and color-fading, which are difficult to treat individually and harder to repair when they interact. Deep learning presents a plausible avenue, but the lack of large-scale datasets of old photos makes addressing this restoration task very challenging. Here we present a novel reference-based end-to-end learning framework that is able to both repair and colorize old, degraded pictures. Our proposed framework consists of three modules: a restoration sub-network that conducts restoration from degradations, a similarity network that performs color histogram matching and color transfer, and a colorization subnet that learns to predict the chroma elements of images conditioned on chromatic reference signals. The overall system makes uses of color histogram priors from reference images, which greatly reduces the need for large-scale training data. We have also created a first-of-a-kind public dataset of real old photos that are paired with ground truth ''pristine'' photos that have been manually restored by PhotoShop experts. We conducted extensive experiments on this dataset and synthetic datasets, and found that our method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models using both qualitative comparisons and quantitative measurements. The code is available at https://github.com/DerrickXuNu/Pik-Fix.

Adobe's next downloadable Neural Filter for Photoshop, which is called'Photo Restoration' is about to be announced, and we've been given an exclusive first look. We attended last night's launch party and got a closer look at the Photo Restoration Neural Filter in action – it's designed for processing old photos, and essentially is a fast, AI-powered way to make them look brand new by removing imperfections and grain. And we do mean fast – the Photo Restoration Neural Filter doesn't really do anything that Photoshop couldn't already do, but the difference is simply that it does it in seconds, with just a single click. Taking the grunt work out of image editing, Photo Restorations will turn removing scratches, noise and other imperfections from old photos – a task that could easily take hours – into the work of a moment. This kind of wizardry is par for the course with Neural Filters, and why Photoshop CC ranks so highly in our guide to the best AI photo editing software.

A lot happened in the machine learning community during the past year. It ranges from photo editing to NLP to training models with "no-code," and I hope they inspire you to build incredible AI-powered products this year. Background Matting v2 takes a cue from the popular The World is Your Green Screen open-source project and showcases how to remove or change the background in real-time. It gives better performance (30fps at 4K and 60fps at FHD) and can be used with Zoom, the popular videoconferencing app. The technique uses an additional captured frame of the background and uses it in recovering the alpha matte and the foreground layer.

Nostalgia website MyHeritage has launched a new service that allows you to create lifelike animations of faces in still photos. The AI-powered service called Deep Nostalgia, launched last week, is free to try and is remarkably accurate in depicting how a person would look if captured on video. Their eyes blink, their head moves and their mouth forms a smile. "You'll have a'wow moment' when you see a treasured family photo come to life with Deep Nostalgia," Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage, said in a statement. "Seeing our beloved ancestors' faces come to life in a video simulation lets us imagine how they might have been in reality, and provides a profound new way of connecting to our family history," he added.

MyHeritage, the online genealogy platform that offers DNA tests for ancestry, has released deep nostalgia, a new feature that animates faces in still photos. You must see how @fakehistoryhunt has used #DeepNostalgia to make #history come alive! 'you'll have a'wow moment' when you see a treasured family photo come to life with deep nostalgia,' said gilad japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage. 'seeing our beloved ancestors' faces come to life in a video simulation lets us imagine how they might have been in reality, and provides a profound new way of connecting to our family history.' 'this new product integration is an exciting collaboration between two innovative companies,' said gil perry, co-founder and CEO of D-ID.

Known as Deep Nostalgia, this is a service offered by DNA and genealogy company MyHeritage. The free service uses artificial intelligence to animate your photos by adding head movement, flicks of the eye, blinks and more. The program is essentially designed to enable people to see long deceased loved ones in more than just a still image. "It makes me so happy to see him smile again!" Try our new #DeepNostalgia #PhotoAnimation feature for yourself and prepare to be AMAZED!!! https://t.co/p3h600G3MX

Genealogy website MyHeritage has unveiled a bizarre new online tool that can animate old photos of deceased family members. The free deepfake technology, called Deep Nostalgia, takes any photo and animates the subject's face – with strangely realistic and unsettling results. Examples provided by MyHeritage show historical figures, including Queen Victoria, Mark Twain and Florence Nightingale, come to life. MyHeritage says the tech gives history'a fresh new perspective' by producing a depiction of how a person'could have moved and looked if captured on video'. It's been developed by researchers at Israel-based firm D-ID, which specialises in video reenactment using deep learning.

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Research. The amount of visual data we accumulate around the world is mind boggling. However, not all the images are captured by high-end DSLR cameras, and very often they suffer from imperfections. It is of tremendous benefit to save those degraded images so that users can reuse them for their own design or other aesthetic purposes. In this blog, we are going to present our latest efforts in image enhancement.

The amount of visual data we accumulate around the world is mind boggling. However, not all the images are captured by high-end DSLR cameras, and very often they suffer from imperfections. It is of tremendous benefit to save those degraded images so that users can reuse them for their own design or other aesthetic purposes. In this blog, we are going to present our latest efforts in image enhancement. The first technique enhances the image resolution of an image file by referring to external reference images.

Kodak Moments, the consumer printing arm of Kodak, has launched a new Facebook Messenger chatbot. Its purpose: to try and sell you prints of your old photos. The app, once it has a connection to your Facebook account, will sift through your old photos and use some type of algorithm to pull out the most interesting ones that you might've forgotten all about. You can try it out by heading to its new Facebook Page and sending a message to the page. Once you've given access, the app will spend some time working out the best suggestion to give you.