Unsupervised Image Enhancement Using Generative Adversarial Networks : An attempt at real-time video enhancement

Abstract: As the world has become more connected meetings have moved online. However, since few have access to studio lighting and uses the embedded webcam the video quality can be far from good. Hence, there is an interest in using a software solution to enhance the video quality in real time. This thesis investigates the feasibility to train a machine learning model to automatically enhance the quality of images. The model must learn without using paired images, since it is difficult to capture images with the exact same content but different quality. Furthermore, the model has to process at least 30 images per second which is a common frequency for videos. Therefore, this thesis investigates the possibility to train a model without paired images and whether such a model can be used in real-time. To answer these questions several sizes of the same model was trained. These were evaluated using six different measures during in order to determine if training without paired data is possible. The models image enhancement capabilities and inference speed were investigated followed by attempts at improving the speed. Finally, different combinations of datasets were investigated to test how well the model generalised to new data. The results show that it is possible to train models for image enhancement without paired data. However, to use such a model in real time a graphics card is needed to reach above 30 images per second.