Reply to post: Re: How about the audio equivalent?

Your phone may be able to clean up snaps – but our AI is much better at touching up, say boffins

Kristian Walsh Silver badge

Re: How about the audio equivalent?

This system is a reconstructor for images. As it fills in pixels that have been obliterated in the input., you're never getting the original - all that you gain is the removal of signals that distract from what the original probably was.

Old recordings to have quite a lot of data, but masked by very high levels of noise. If you consider that an old phonograph was basically a cutting needle coupled to a drum with very little processing between, there's quite a bit of information that could be pulled out of it.

"Improving" the listening is all that's needed for academic study of old recordings, and certainly for entertainment purposes - I've listened to a few early recordings, and it takes a while for your ears to adjust to the noise and missing high and low frequency information. pre-processing with an AI could help bring these to a wider audience.

For more serious work, just like the medical imaging examples, the post-AI version is used to get an overview, but where there's doubt, the original pre-processed file is still available for detailed study. This already happens in historical research: historians normally work from transcripts and translations of old documents, but in special cases they will need to examine the original book to resolve a query.

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