Depixelizing Pixel Art

[RupeeClock]

You lot should all be ashamed of yourselves. Pixel art is a dying talent and here you all are trying to give it that final kick off the roof. If you need to play old games on a huge TV, then do a pixel perfect resize, those pixels were designed to be seen, blurring and smoothing and stretching is not how these gfx should be viewed. There is no reason at all to ruin nice pixel art like that, if you don't like how it looks then don't play those games, simple.

This.
Plus add some nice looking-non intrusive fake scanlines ( yes, the pixel artist took TVs scanlines into account when drawing their sprites and backgrounds ) and there you go with a true representation of the art !

I prefer seeing raw pixels too, but usually on a native display.
A SNES game usually displays 252x224 image, on my 1920x1080 monitor it helps to put a filter on that because the upscale image is almost five times bigger.
I prefer a TV-scanline filter like ZSNES has that makes the video low-quality, but doesn't actually try to filter the pixels.

Pixel art most certainly still has its place on mobile medium, or in indie PC games.

By the way, I through this up for comparison's sake.

 

[Ikki]

I prefer the original pixeled ones but this is pretty cool.

 

[Rydian]

You lot should all be ashamed of yourselves. Pixel art is a dying talent and here you all are trying to give it that final kick off the roof. If you need to play old games on a huge TV, then do a pixel perfect resize, those pixels were designed to be seen, blurring and smoothing and stretching is not how these gfx should be viewed. There is no reason at all to ruin nice pixel art like that, if you don't like how it looks then don't play those games, simple.

Not everything was meant to be pixel art. Nowadays people have a wide range of mediums, but back in the days of the NES and SNES you didn't have the choice of using polygonal graphics and all that jazz.

 

[Issac]

Wow, this is something for me

I've read countless microsoft research papers for several projects so far

I'm very interested to see how this would do on photograph upscaling... Not that I'm expecting wonders, but it'd be interesting none the less..

 

[JonnyPoots]

I wonder if this could be implemented into minecraft to soften the existing pixels as opposed to using texture packs. i personally love pixel art and i love its use in minecraft (pixels art = so not dead). though my roommate recently showed it to a hardcore gamer friend of ours and the jerk (at first) refused to believe the game was even remotely popular (he obviously lives on his consoles, not the internet) and he could not get passed the graphics at all. once we had a more pleasant texture, his "HD-tarded" eyes could finally see the game for what it was.

 

[shakirmoledina]

this would revolutionize graphics in one of the best ways including emulators of the games of yore. Wonderful programming will lead to this which i wish i can do once.
the hq2x etc filters are great but they seem a little forced in the examples above. This looks much more natural

 

[_Chaz_]

Depixelating pixel art would be like depainting paint art.

 

[Wizerzak]

Nice, can't wait to try this out. Though I find that squinting gives the same effect.

 

[Issac]

Depixelating pixel art would be like depainting paint art.

Actually, yes, and that's also something that's been something big through the ages..
How many paintings strive towards being photo realistic?

Pixel art as pixel art is great.
Depixelated pixel art as an alternative to nearest neighbour upscaling is great.
Paintings are great.
photo realistic paintings are great.
My view on this

 

[SamAsh07]

I love pixel art and it should remain as it is. However, this does look intriguing.

 

[stinkoman]

I kinda wanna see how Earthbound looks through this. I bet the interface looks nice. I'd miss the font, though.

 

[Deleted-236924]

chao1212, here you go.

Spoiler

You lot should all be ashamed of yourselves. Pixel art is a dying talent and here you all are trying to give it that final kick off the roof. If you need to play old games on a huge TV, then do a pixel perfect resize, those pixels were designed to be seen, blurring and smoothing and stretching is not how these gfx should be viewed. There is no reason at all to ruin nice pixel art like that, if you don't like how it looks then don't play those games, simple.

This.
Plus add some nice looking-non intrusive fake scanlines ( yes, the pixel artist took TVs scanlines into account when drawing their sprites and backgrounds ) and there you go with a true representation of the art !

I prefer seeing raw pixels too, but usually on a native display.
A SNES game usually displays 252x224 image, on my 1920x1080 monitor it helps to put a filter on that because the upscale image is almost five times bigger.
I prefer a TV-scanline filter like ZSNES has that makes the video low-quality, but doesn't actually try to filter the pixels.

Pixel art most certainly still has its place on mobile medium, or in indie PC games.

By the way, I through this up for comparison's sake.

I can't believe it took to long for someone to point out SNES emulators already had a feature like this.

 

[Rydian]

Their features like this aren't nearly as good, that's the point.

 

[macgeek417]

You lot should all be ashamed of yourselves. Pixel art is a dying talent and here you all are trying to give it that final kick off the roof. If you need to play old games on a huge TV, then do a pixel perfect resize, those pixels were designed to be seen, blurring and smoothing and stretching is not how these gfx should be viewed. There is no reason at all to ruin nice pixel art like that, if you don't like how it looks then don't play those games, simple.

This a thousand times. Super Mario Bros. looks just fine in it's original, pixelized form.

 

[Deleted User]

Leave pixel art alone. If someone depixelizes megaman, the world shall explode.

 

[Jamstruth]

I can't believe it took to long for someone to point out SNES emulators already had a feature like this.

THat's because we've all been working on the assumption that they know. None of those are producing results as good as this new algorithm. If that clip is full speed, however, then we still have a bit to go with it.

Also @Everyone dissing this. Its an OPTION! You don't have to use it, its just there to give the option to people who want to use it. I use it a bit but for some games it doesn't look right so I disable it. It just depends on the person and the game.

 

[Veho]

I prefer pixel art, but it's nice to have this as an option too. And it does look better than those other algorhitms.

Besides, research in this field will one day give us CSI-style image enhancing, so don't knock it yet

Spoiler

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk[/youtube]
See that pixel over there? Enhance it.

 

[YayMii]

BTW, the document mentions that they're not trying to kill pixel art. In fact, they enjoy pixel art, and did this for a challenge. The document says they just wanted the most accurate algorithm in attempt to retain some of the charm of the pixelated original, while making it suitable for vector graphics.

Spoiler

chao1212, here you go.

@RupeeClock : I can't believe it took to long for someone to point out SNES emulators already had a feature like this.

Nope.avi
If you haven't noticed, the OP had a link to a document with comparisons to other filters on it. Any of the current filters don't match up to this, so your post/EarthBound screenshot is invalid.

Here's a comparison I made, including the new method:

 

[Snailface]

Is the group that created this algorithm trying to license it or is it free to the public? If they're licensing, I can't imagine why Nintendo or other companies haven't purchased it yet.

 

[Rydian]

It might not be fast enough for realtime on machines that are generally limited to (emulation of) pixel art...