Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbaker | Hacker News Reader

Would really like to see some original pictures, blur, then the model output. Pretty impressive results but it seems like it might suffer heavily from overfitting. Or maybe that's the point.

I always come back to this article: https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...

View on HN

I'm not too fond of the term "restoration" because it implies that it's recovered the original face and not just generated one that looks similar.

This is one of the reasons I don't want the police using facial recognition.

In the mid to late 2000s, a British company sold a glorified dowsing rod as an explosives detection device to several international customers, most notably the Iraqi government [1].

I can easily see somebody taking this face restoration tech and packaging it up as a CSI-style "image enhancement" suite to law enforcement for cleaning up CCTV footage. People could easily be wrongly imprisoned because they happen to resemble the fake face created by the algorithm.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651

The term "restoration" is already used to refer to the restoration of artworks. Oftentimes that work can't recover the original, and various fixes and approximations must be made. Yet the term restoration is still used, because that's what one is doing. There are, though, plenty of terms of art (pun intended) for _how_ a painting is restored and modern restoration involves many tricks to ensure that those changes are both non-destructive and reversible.

Perhaps digital restoration will begin to adopt similar terms of art for succinctly describing how an image has been restored. Lucky for us, digital images can easily carry metadata that describe what's been done to them, including perhaps a copy or hash of the original image.

Side note: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ is a great channel for learning about modern art restoration.

Entirely agree. This is where some of the AI "controversy" has come from. A blurred Obama photo got "restored" into a white guy's face, which was never going to be understood well by the general public.

The nomenclature needs to improve for this sort of thing to make sense, and it not be used for the wrong purposes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com