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Depixelizing Pixel Art

research.microsoft.com

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Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#151

Post by fuzzywalrus »

Ricapar wrote: post #27
mrbuttons454 wrote: post #9

to me, hq4x looks better every time.

I think it depends on what your end goal is. Are you trying to scale and hide the pixel-ness of the original? The "ours" does pretty darn well, especially if you look at the Boo example as mentioned above. However, if you're looking at in the case of an SNES emulator or something.. then hq4x seems like the best choice. It keeps true to the original pixel art, while appearing significantly better.

Linked earlier:

Video of Ours vs HQ4X. Ours seems to have a slight advantage to my eyes, admittedly it is a personal preference. Text has a distinct advantage on HQ4X but Mario and Yoshi look better even if less "accurate". https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart...

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#152

Post by fat0wl »

dyselon wrote: post #118
josh-wrale wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worst case, you could imagine Mario walking in front of the background and his shape shifting madly with every step he took? This brings up something interesting: In terms of media containing sprites and minimal layering (e.g. NES-like games), wouldn't it be computationally cheaper to perform the scaling on the sprites and textures independently of one another, instead of post-processing? I wonder if there is any e…

It'd be kind of hard, as what makes up a "sprite" lives in two different places - one that stores all the tile data, and another that basically describes which tiles make up which sprites. The latter is likely to change every frame, and potentially the former, too, so you'd still be rescaling some stuff every frame. You'd also have to rescale some things that are affected by palette changes, which sometimes change ev…

i dont understand, as long as you figure out how to get the sprites into the right formats this would be immensely computationally cheaper ("time-saving"?) than post-processing every frame

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#153

Post by Ziron »

Houshalter wrote: post #123
anon4 wrote: post #71

The issue with depixelizing pixel art is that you need an AI that can identify semantically what the features in the sprite are. When you look at Mario you know you're looking at a stout little man with a hat, you can identify his eyes, ears, nose, hair, hat, moustache, shirt, gloves, overalls and shoes. Given that knowledge, if I were to depixelize Mario's sprite, I'll know the rough shape of his shoes and where the…

I've been thinking about doing something like this. Compress images down to half resolution, then train a neural network to blow it back up and guess the pixels as accurately as possible.

There has been a neural network scaler called NNEDI3 available as a plugin for avisynth for a few years. It was trained in exactly the way you are talking about and does an amazing job at both deinterlacing and upscaling video.

It does a great job of scaling pixel art too. I'm kinda surprised it hasn't been implemented in any emulator. With the newer opencl implantation it is finally able to run in real-time.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison.php?id=46792

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#154

Post by oofabz »

slazaro wrote: post #140
dublinben wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. That looks awful. 2. We just need vector-based icons already.

I think the ideal would be something similar to fonts: there's the vector definition for big sizes, and optional pixel-perfect definition for small sizes, because rendering vectors on very small sizes (16x16, 32x32) might look worse than hand-crafted pixel work.

These days, font rendering does not often rely on bitmaps, even at small sizes. Instead, they typically use hinting and subpixel rendering. I would love to see these effective techniques applied to vector graphics too.

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#155

Post by [deleted] »

slazaro wrote: post #140
dublinben wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. That looks awful. 2. We just need vector-based icons already.

I think the ideal would be something similar to fonts: there's the vector definition for big sizes, and optional pixel-perfect definition for small sizes, because rendering vectors on very small sizes (16x16, 32x32) might look worse than hand-crafted pixel work.

[deleted]

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#156

Post by Too »

bri3d wrote: post #29
rkuykendall-com wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know if MS is working on Mac-Style resolution independence for W9? I'm currently running a Retina MBP, at 2x res I think, and it works _perfectly_. The first few months some apps didn't work well, but the community adapted very quickly.

Windows has had support for resolution independence where DPI is configurable across a continuum (rather than only available as 1x or 2x scale like on the Mac) for quite some time - the issue is that with a huge legacy application base, a giant morass of drawing technologies, and no shipped "HiDPI" or "Retina" Windows hardware until recently, there's been no real incentive for app developers to support it. In Windows…

Old style GDI+ apps that are incorrectly marked as being resolution aware even though they aren't is a bigger problem than programs not marking it at all. If it's not marked you get simple 2x scaling but if it's marked and not implemented properly anything can happen.

What is needed for this to work is a user setting to override the programs own preference. There is just too much legacy cruft that accidentally marked themselves as being resolution aware even if they're not. Or drop the old flag and create a new one called something like "really really resolution aware"

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#157

Post by bri3d »

Too wrote: post #156
bri3d wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has had support for resolution independence where DPI is configurable across a continuum (rather than only available as 1x or 2x scale like on the Mac) for quite some time - the issue is that with a huge legacy application base, a giant morass of drawing technologies, and no shipped "HiDPI" or "Retina" Windows hardware until recently, there's been no real incentive for app developers to support it. In Windows…

Old style GDI+ apps that are incorrectly marked as being resolution aware even though they aren't is a bigger problem than programs not marking it at all. If it's not marked you get simple 2x scaling but if it's marked and not implemented properly anything can happen. What is needed for this to work is a user setting to override the programs own preference. There is just too much legacy cruft that accidentally marked…

Didn't there used to be a user setting in the "Compatibility" tab?

I haven't played with this stuff in a few years - my housemates and I tried to use a 46" TV in the basement as our web browsing machine for a while and ended up frustrated every time we tried to scale the UI on any platform (OSX, Ubuntu with both Unity and GNOME2, Windows).

Re: Depixelizing Pixel Art

#158

Post by Houshalter »

Ziron wrote: post #153
Houshalter wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about doing something like this. Compress images down to half resolution, then train a neural network to blow it back up and guess the pixels as accurately as possible.

There has been a neural network scaler called NNEDI3 available as a plugin for avisynth for a few years. It was trained in exactly the way you are talking about and does an amazing job at both deinterlacing and upscaling video. It does a great job of scaling pixel art too. I'm kinda surprised it hasn't been implemented in any emulator. With the newer opencl implantation it is finally able to run in real-time. http://…

Whoa, that's pretty good.
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