anime4K paper

[yushengnan1]

Can you share a link to anime4k's paper? Where can I find it? Can you share the link with me?

[topin89]

If there is no paper, can you write a short description how it's that much faster than ESRGAN with without visible quality loss.
Really, how? Is it because of some layer size reduction? Is it because ESRGAN is unoptimized pytorch script and Anime4K is by-hand optimized shader? All of the above, something I can't think of? Is it a himitsu? (himitsu means secret)

[bloc97]

The Anime4K shader is not a GAN, it was trained using pixel-wise loss. If I remember correctly recent SRGANs have 10M+ parameters while the optimized smaller Anime4K shaders have 1.6k parameters. GANs can implicitly learn to restore some unseen degradations by learning from a discriminator (the optimum in a zero-sum game optimization will be much more robust to degradation compared to a standard MSE optimization). Instead of using a discriminator, Anime4K was trained on a special dataset that mimics the degradation of 1080p anime.

[bloc97]

This is why if you try Anime4K on very old anime it does not look as good compared to 1080p anime. It is not a replacement for SRGANs, but simply an alternative to watch 1080p anime on 4K screen in real time.