@websr/websr NPM

WebSR

A free and open-source Javascript library / SDK for running practical, real-time AI Upscaling of videos and images on the web.

Check out the demo!

Warning This project is very new and still in development, and shouldn't be used (yet) in production until stable. Expect API changes between versions and bugs

Installation

npm

npm install @websr/websr

yarn

yarn add @websr/websr

Quick Start

import WebSR from  '@websr/websr';

const gpu = await WebSR.initWebGPU();

if(!gpu) return console.log("Browser/device doesn't support WebGPU");

const websr = new WebSR({
    source: // An HTML Video Element
    network_name: "anime4k/cnn-2x-s",
    weights: await (await fetch('./cnn-2x-s.json')).json() //found in weights/anime4k folder
    gpu,
    canvas: //A canvas, with 2x the width and height of your input video
});

await websr.start();   // Play the video

Why WebSR

Super resolution is a technique which uses Neural Networks to "reconstruct" a high-resolution image from a low resolution image. Practically speaking, it provides better visual results than traditional upscaling algorithms like Bicubic, which is what devices and browsers usually use by default, at the cost of significantly more computation.

A general rule of thumb is that bigger super-resolution networks (which use more computation) generally provide better results.

This is why commercial AI upscaling software like Topaz Labs can produce excellent quality results, though it can take 10 seconds or more on a dedicated GPU to upscale a single image. If the goal is to run super resolution on a video at 30 frames per second on mid-tier integrated graphcs cards in the browser, you need networks that run thousands of times faster. Computation is a huge challenge and a big reason that super resolution hasn't been more popular in web video.

WebSR is an attempt to take on this challenge, and make super resolution practical in the browser. By taking advantage of the fact that super-resolution has proved relatively better at improving the video quality of Anime, Cartoons and Screen-sharing content, as well the faster graphics computation enabled by WebGPU, WebSR should be just-about practical enough for production video and WebRTC applicaitons in cases where bandwidth or video quality is an issue.

See this video for more info on super resolution on the web.

How it works

WebSR uses hand-written WebGPU shaders to implement Convolutional Neural Networks (like this one from Anime4K).

When you create a WebSRinstance and call websr.start(), that starts a render-loop which will take in video frames, one by one, and upscale them using the Neural Network, before painting the result to a <canvas>.

While there are many super-resolution networks and algorithms available, for a proof of concept, WebSR implements networks from Anime4K as

It was designed for real time video
Already has GPU shader written in the similar glsl language
Already has wide community adoption.

This repo provides the default production weights asociated with the cnn-2x-s network directly from Anime4K.

You can custom train or fine-tune the network and generate your own weights - see the notebooks in the custom-training/ folder for details.

The plan is to add additional neural networks, whether from other open-source projects or building custom networks specifically for WebSR.

Acknowledgements

Anime4K for an excellent project
WebGPU for enabling compute-intensive projects like this
Blender foundation for use of their hero movie in WebSR demos

Roadmap

Very soon

Automated builds & tests

At some point

Add more upscaling networks (especially for other types of content - like real life, or screen-content)
Dynamically switch between networks based on type of content
Provide lower level controls (e.g. control over the render loop)
Do processing in Offscreen Canvas / worker thread
Write Mobile SDKs with similar functionality