Google Polishes Even Your Oldest, Most Hopeless Images With New Photos AI

By Mikelle Leow, 01 Jul 2021

Image via Google AI Blog

Smartphone photography has come a long way, and you can now easily peer back at your albums for a well-needed swig of nostalgia. However, that doesn’t mean old pictures taken back in 2010 are memories lost. If artificial intelligence is able to restore a Rembrandt painting to immense detail, so, too, can it revive your old photos.

Google has introduced a couple of impressive AI image enhancement tools in the latest version of the Google Photos editor that speedily wring out excess noise and blur in photos, even if they look like they were taken from a camera circa World War II.

As noted by Forbes, the ‘Sharpen’ and ‘Denoise’ algorithms work in spite of the quality of the camera that was used to take the photos.

The ‘Denoise’ feature relies on a multi-layered “pull-push” technique comprising simple methods to clean up the graininess of images. And since it is powered by basic tools, users can have their old photos polished without lag time.

What’s more surprising is that the ‘Sharpen’ tool is run on a counterintuitive ‘Polyblur’ process that combats mild blurring by adding more blur.