IMPLEMENTATION OF REAL-ESRGAN TO IMPROVE THE IMAGE RESOLUTION OF HISTORIC BUILDINGS IN INDONESIA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29407/noe.v8i02.26604Keywords:
Real-ESRGAN, High-Order Degradation Model, Historical Building ImagesAbstract
The preservation of digital images of historical buildings in Indonesia faces visual quality challenges due to degradation such as blur, noise, resizing, and compression. Images from Leiden University Libraries experience visual degradation due to the digitization process, the age of the documents, and the limitations of documentation technology, so the type of degradation in the images is not known with certainty. Therefore, to address these problems, this study implements the Real-ESRGAN method to realistically increase the resolution of historical building images without explicit information on the type of degradation. Real-ESRGAN is a development of ESRGAN that combines the RRDB architecture in the generator and U-Net in the discriminator. This model is trained using the Flickr2K dataset whose degradation is simulated with a high-order degradation model to resemble real-world images. Evaluation using the no-reference CLIP-IQA metric shows that the Real-ESRGAN model is capable of producing high-resolution images with good perceptual quality without the need for reference images. The highest average CLIP-IQA score obtained was 0,70863 at the 119th epoch. This value indicates that the resulting image results are in accordance with good quality images visually and show the potential to increase the resolution of images of historic buildings in Indonesia.
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