About

Face Depixelizer is an application that generates high-resolution human portraits from low-resolution input images. The application briefly gained popularity online in June 2020 when it was used to upscale pixelated portraits of characters from various video game franchises.

History

On June 19th, 2020, Russian developer Bomze (Denis Malimonov) uploaded Face Depixelizer to GitHub.^[1] The application generates high-resolution human portraits based on a low-resolution input image. On the same day, Bomze tweeted^[2] about the application, with the tweet gaining over 4,200 retweets and 10,600 likes (shown below).

Features

Face Depixelizer is based on "PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models"^[3] repository.^[1] Given a low-resolution input image, Face Depixelizer searches the outputs of a generative model for high-resolution images that are perceivably realistic and downscaled correctly.

Highlights

Following the June 19th, 2020, announcement tweet, on June 20th, Twitter^[4] user @Rob_Milliken inquired whether the application could be used on 8-bit video game characters, with the developer responding^[5] with an upscaled image of the Wolfenstein main protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz (shown below). The tweet received over 2,700 retweets and 12,600 likes in two days.

Starting on that day, multiple users posted result images of video game characters processed by Face Depixelizer. For example, an image of Cacodemon posted by @papaabar^[6] gained over 300 retweets and 2,400 likes in two days (shown below, left). An image of Creeper posted by @jonathanfly^[7] gained over 240 retweets and 1,700 likes in the same period (shown below, right).

In the following days, several online outlets reported on the app, including articles by Kotaku^[8] and PetaPixel.^[9]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References