Amazing cleanup Team Negative1! If I had not seen the damage, I would have never known it was there...
@ thorr
Sorry to hear that, but I understand where you're coming from. I hope we can leave all the hostility in the past.
Here is an updated sample for the first 10 min of Star Wars, which includes the intro, title track, Tantive IV scenes, and the arrival on Tatooine. The aliasing sadly is still there, but the halo and ringing artifacts have been greatly reduced. The grain has also been significantly reduced, while maintaining the level of detail. The aspect ratio is still under debate.
Edit: Video removed to make place for an SRV9 sample.
It was the intention of this thread to find out if super resolution can squeeze more detail out of the GOUT. It was never the intention to do a full blown restoration like Team Blu has done or to compete with their great work. Of course as time goes by, and discussion rages on, things can quickly get out of hand. It's understandable that there is a desire for comparison to standards like Team Blu's work. It seems that Team Blu member dark_jedi would prefer no comparison at all. Since this is an open forum, I will follow the majority opinion with respects to this matter, so please state your opinions...
@ zee944
That sounds reasonable. It is my intention to post more comparisons with Team Blu as soon as I get my hands on their upscale.
@ zee944
You didn't state what happened. You said I did everything in the book to avoid a comparison with Team Blu. This statement was false. I've asked for screenshots of Team Blu's upscale well before you appeared on this thread.
The screencap I posted was close, but the super resolution upscale had more detail. The openings in the stormtroopers mask on the far left and far right cannot be seen in Team Blu's upscale. They can be seen in the super resolution upscale. There may be other reasons to prefer Team Blu's, but detail reconstruction is not one of them (for this screenshot anyway).
Here's the exact same method applied to part of a screenshot from the Star Wars blu ray.
Original vs downscaled + upscaled image
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125900
Original vs downscaled + upscaled image + sharpen
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125901
Original vs super resolution
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125902
Downscaled + upscaled image + sharpen vs super resolution
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125903
Just like the previous example, super resolution has more detail and less artifacts.
@ zee944
There's nothing carefully chosen about it. It's a simple statement of fact that subpixel detail is lost while downscaling an image. It's also a statement of fact that this information cannot be retrieved from that image once it is lost. Super resolution can retrieve this detail. You can choose to ignore it, but the facts remain the same.
Your second statement is also erroneous, since I did post a comparison to Team Blu's GOUT, and I specifically requested for more screenshots for that purpose.
For some reason you seem to want to antagonize posters in this thread, with deliberately aggressive statements. It should come as no surprise that this behaviour is not appreciated.
Here's a simple example of image upscaling using a noise free source image. This example shows the difference between sharpening an upscaled low resolution single image and applying super resolution to multiple low resolution images with subpixel shifts. For this example I wrote my own simple super resolution script in MATLAB. The image is first downscaled to half the resolution, than upscaled two times to the original image size (using bicubic).
The reality of sharpening is that it cannot retrieve details below the pixel level. This is where the difference with super resolution begins. Super resolution does retrieve details below the pixel level.
The first image shows the original image vs the downscaled + upscaled image:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125890
Because the stripes on the girl's pants are at the pixel level, the low resolution image cannot resolve this detail, so it is lost. This lost detail cannot be retrieved by sharpening as is obvious from the next comparison:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125891
The information about the stripes is lost in a single image, but can be retrieved by combining the information in multiple images. This is the strength of super resolution, as can be seen in the next comparison:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125895
So, although there is overlap between sharpening and super resolution at the super pixel level, super resolution is the only way to retrieve details at the subpixel level. As such super resolution is generally more detailed, more accurate at reconstructing shapes, and has less artifacts, than sharpening. Therefore, if you have a super resolution algorithm available, it makes no sense to use sharpening, as you get all the advantages of sharpening with super resolution anyway.
@ Laserdisc Master
We obviously know R2D2 doesn't have jaggies, but an algorithm like super resolution obviously doesn't. So taking the GOUT as a source it tries to enhance details including jaggies. Another filter might assume all edges are smooth, so it will correct the jaggies in R2D2, but also smooth sharp edges that are supposed to be sharp. In the end no filter will be able to perfectly reconstruct the true source material. A combination of methods could certainly do better, but there will always be some gains and some losses.
Looking great once again!
@ everybody else
I will await the judgement of the wise men (women?) with respect to the AR.
@ zee944
No we're not going to square one. Your opinion is clear. We disagree. That's it. This discussion has taken up enough space on this thread.
@ Laserdisc Master
Sure, I'll write an article on fanres this weekend. :-)
The standard for NTSC is that the 8 outermost pixels should be blank and are meant for cropping and not be displayed. The centre 704 pixels contains the video and determine the AR. These are displayed as 640x480 square pixels for a 4:3 AR. So if you remove the black bars and rescale the GOUT to it's correct AR, you get a 640x274 video with an AR of 2.34:1. If you then upscale by a factor of 2, you have a video of 1280x548. Now as you have noticed the blank areas of the GOUT are not entirely blank. They contain video. However if you were to upscale the 714x274 video to 1280x548 (the left 4 pixels and the right 2 pixels are blank for Star Wars) you would get the wrong AR, since the true AR is determined by the centre 704 pixels, not 714 pixels. So I did what was necessary to keep the correct AR and that is the crop the video to 704x274 and upscale to 1280x548.
It was CatBus who provided this information thankfully. So all credit should go to him. I didn't know about this, but was struggling with getting the correct AR.
If I can find a very good anti aliasing filter that doesn't destroy too much detail, I will definitely use it. Have any of you got any suggestions?
With respect to the AR, the correct AR is obtained by upscaling pixel ratio 704x480 (640x480 = 4:3 AR) to 1280x960. The only way to achieve this is to crop the 8 outermost pixels of the GOUT (the overscan). Any other value will result in an incorrect AR. By removing the black bars you thus obtain a 704x274 source that will scale to 1280x548 for 720p.
Since were putting up screenshots again, here are two more for SRV8 ;-).
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125700
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125705
This weekend I will post an update of the 10 min video sample for SRV8. More video samples will follow after that, and of course the release of Star Wars.
If any of the Team Blu members are watching and willing to provide some screenshots they think are interesting for comparison, post them here or send me a PM, and I will post them.
Looks great! I would be interested in these. The 1997 SE were the first and last time I saw these in the theatre. Although I prefer the unaltered originals, they're far superior to those horrible 2004/2011 versions. All I can say to those is noooooooooooooo!!!! :-)
@ zee944
I agree that it's useful to compare different methods. I've stated I was interested in comparing super resolution to the Team Blu upscale since before the start of our discussion. The reason I was defensive is, because you claimed you could achieve the same result with sharpening and denoising, without anything to subtantiate that claim. Your upscale example is interesting, but not meaningful to the discussion, because we cannot compare the result to super resolution. The fact that details are enhanced is great, but we don't know super resolution would retrieve the same details. The methods may be complementary and retrieve different bits of information. I never stated super resolution is superior in every way to other methods, only that super resolution, when it comes to retrieving lost details, generally performs much better than most other methods, as is evident from scientific literature. However, there are other aspects to upscaling that are equally important, such as aliasing, artifacts, etc. The weaknesses of super resolution have also been discussed in this thread, and I've tried to adress them in the best way possible.
Luckily, the artifacts can be relatively easily avoided:
Team Blu vs super resolution v8
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125665
Avisynth Spline64Resize vs super resolution v8
My two cents:
Not surprisingly super resolution has more detail (openings in the stormtroopers helmets), but also more aliasing. There's also an upscaling artifact on one of the stormtroopers chests (difficult to spot).
Here's a comparison with a frame from Team Blu's upscale found on this forum.
Avisynth Spline64Resize vs Team Blu
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125656
Team Blu vs super resolution v8
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125657
Avisynth Spline64Resize vs super resolution v8
@ Zyrother
And it has been and will be thanks to constructive critisism from forum members like yourself.
@ Laserdisc Master
Wise words my friend...
@ zee944
It's becoming tedious, but again only opinion, and nothing to back it up. You're 80% claim would mean something if you could provide some evidence. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, and it's neither theoretical or inaccessible. I've got more faith in years of scientific research than your baseless claims. But like Laserdisc Master suggested, if you think you can do better, start a thread and prove your point, but until that time: "bachelor's wifes and maiden's children are well trained".
In any case, you're happy with your method, I'm happy with mine. Let's leave it at that. This discussion is pretty pointless anyway, since we're obviously never going to agree.
Edit:
To answer your question: sharpening refers to the process of increasing contrast in edges of objects; deblurring refers to the process of deconvolution, which corrects a defect. To say it bluntly, sharpening treats the symptoms, deblurring treats the cause. It comes as no surprise the latter is generally preferred.