We all have old photos of our family and friends that might not be in good condition. With the help of technology, we can try to fix those classic images. Louis Bouchard and PetaPixel developed a free AI tool to restore old photos. Former Tencent researchers released the AI tool GFP-GAN (Generative Facial Prior-Generative Adversarial Network). You can restore any damaged image or low-resolution portrait using this technology.
What is GFP-GAN?
It’s a conventional AI tool that uses the pre-trained NVIDIA’s StyleGAN-2 version of the existing model for the image generation process. Where its goal is to detect people by their eyes and mouths in the photos, it collects and merges data from AI models to find and fill in the missing details and fix them with realistic details while ensuring quality and accuracy won’t be compromised. This is an open-source project; you can check it out on GitHub. There are some limitations, but it’s quite accurate.
How to Restore Old Photos
It is available for free and is quite a straightforward method. Here is a guide to restoring your old and damaged photos.
- Open GFP-GAN.
- Click on Choose a file that you want to restore.
- Click on Restore and wait for it to finish. That’s it!
Once it’s finished with restoration, you can download the image to save on your device. Some flaws might include a slight change of identity and images that come in low resolution. We can expect significant updates to this project in the future.