[HN Gopher] The Hindenburg disaster denoised, upscaled, and colo...
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The Hindenburg disaster denoised, upscaled, and colorized using ML
[video]
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 144 points
Date : 2021-10-15 19:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| oofbey wrote:
| They should add a regularizing term between frames, like a simple
| L2 loss between output pixel values, to stabilize the color.
| bsenftner wrote:
| And stabilize the frames, an early assignment in many computer
| vision courses. No need for the text frames and video images to
| be so shaken/stuttered.
| 323 wrote:
| Needs TikTok song:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXLicO0CRvk
| turtletontine wrote:
| I don't know if this is a breakthrough but... Frankly this looks
| awful.
|
| I think I could handle unrealistic colors but the way they
| flicker so much frame to frame is really jarring.
|
| It's interesting that the algorithm seems to generate chromatic
| aberration at hard edges? Most clearly around the letters on the
| title cards.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| For an early alpha version, it is ok-ish. For anything but
| that, it is terrible.
| [deleted]
| rob74 wrote:
| Looks like the AI can handle objects it "knows" (people, grass,
| sky etc.) okish, but is completely confounded by the Zeppelin -
| which is sad, as the Hindenburg is of course present in most of
| the shots. Maybe they should have trained it with some
| color(ized) photos of the Hindenburg (like this one:
| https://www.alamy.de/das-deutsche-zeppelin-luftschiff-die-
| hi...) first?
| sp332 wrote:
| The original video was interlaced. The deinterlacing part of
| the algorithm is not very good, and I think they would have
| gotten better results with a special-purpose pass before
| handing off to the neural network.
| spqr0a1 wrote:
| Or using a better source video. As there's no way the
| original film was interlaced.
| bagels wrote:
| Original film may have flickered, or the playback process
| to capture may have induced flicker.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I'm now imagining a low-paid 1930s film job called
| "interlacer" which consisted of taking every frame and
| drawing tiny, perfectly straight black lines on it, with a
| tiny fineliner and a tiny ruler, on odd and even rows,
| every next frame.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I know of a company that did the opposite to handle 2:3
| pulldown for rotoscoping. They had a photoshop action
| that would select every other line, copy&paste to a new
| doc, collapse the empty space, and then paint the frame.
| Then, do that a second time for the other half. Finally,
| more actions to recombine.
|
| I couldn't make this up. My jaw just hit the floor when
| it was explained to me the first time. I still shake my
| head typing it up to post here.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What is missing is object continuity with respect to color.
| That would quiet things down tremendously. Right now it is as
| if every object gets re-painted from one frame to the next in
| a completely new (and often garish or wildly incorrect)
| color.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| I believe there already is quite some continuity, otherwise
| the colors would flicker much stronger from frame to frame.
| In the video it varies smoothly from frame to frame.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are many instances of frame-to-frame discontinuity
| that I can't explain other than by a lack of object
| detection and labeling. It would be less wrong to use the
| color from the previous frame even if the lighting
| changes than to use an entirely different hue for the
| same object.
|
| Only things like TV screens and other displays (and some
| interesting objects covered with micro surfaces that can
| cause light interference) can change color that rapidly
| given the same color incident light.
| Someone wrote:
| I think they get that not because of putting in that
| constraint, but only because subsequent frames are
| similar. That makes the coloring algorithm pick similar
| coloring.
| nobrains wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron
| canjobear wrote:
| It's interesting that the color of the Hindenburg itself is
| always shifting. The object is so out of sample that the ML
| colorizer has no idea what to do with it.
| userbinator wrote:
| I was half-expecting it to turn into the colour of a manatee.
| teeray wrote:
| This reminds me so much of the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka Tunnel
| Scene
| andreasley wrote:
| A beautiful animation of the ship's design and the disaster:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJy17qZmhjE
| [deleted]
| diklon wrote:
| Although visually it appears to be high resolution, it feels like
| an illusion, like my brain still receives no additional
| information Vs the original. Which is odd because I can look at
| individual elements and see more precision.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Err...WOW! That was fast...
|
| And I've been unaware that Manhattan had so many skyscrapers at
| the time. Or maybe not. But one can glimpse that for a few
| seconds in the video. Awesome.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Yeah it's wild how modern Manhattan looks in the background.
| I've seen pictures of course but in color/motion it is really
| striking.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Another way of looking at that is how little change a typical
| city will undergo once it is laid out. This goes for Rome and
| Amsterdam just as it does for NYC.
|
| I was away from Amsterdam for about a decade before coming
| back there after having lived there before for a stretch of
| nearly 28 years (with a few longer absences) and what
| surprised me is how little had changed, and yet, here and
| there there were buildings that I was pretty sure weren't
| there before or some familiar landmarks that had gone. Over
| many decades or even centuries that kind of change will add
| up, and even though for Amsterdam in particular at some point
| there was a plan to 'overhaul' it and make it more modern
| (which fortunately got arrested in the earliest stage, but it
| did do a lot of damage to the east side of the river Amstel)
| the vast bulk of the city has been unchanged since decades.
|
| What real change there is is expansion wherever there was
| undeveloped land, but that isn't change insomuch as it is
| simply growth, what was there before remains.
|
| https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2019/10/27/the-1960s-when-
| the-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Amsterdam_since_t.
| ..
|
| My mom still remembers that just behind the Olympic stadium
| in Amsterdam there were meadows and cows grazing! (That's now
| deep inside the city).
|
| If you're interested in when buildings in Amsterdam were
| first constructed you can find that information in:
|
| https://www.wozwaardeloket.nl/
|
| Just zoom in on the city, click on any building outline on
| the map and on the right hand side you will find all kinds of
| interesting information, including the year that ground was
| broken or the building was formally entered into the
| registry. This information is not always available but it
| still contains a wealth of information.
| ChristianGeek wrote:
| Manhattan has never looked so green!
| GhostVII wrote:
| I think it would be cool if you could have some kind of combo
| human+ML system, where you use ML to actually detect the
| different objects and track them between frames, and a human can
| choose what color to use for each one. In a couple shots at least
| the Hindenburg showed as fully red instead of silver, and I don't
| think it is always possible for an algorithm to actually know the
| correct color without external data. If the algorithm could just
| say "I've identified this object between frames", and then the
| human can choose the correct color, could be best of both worlds.
|
| Or maybe you could feed in some reference photos with the same
| objects, but already colorized. And then the algorithm could
| match objects from the reference photos to those in the black and
| white ones to get the colors.
| txdm wrote:
| I never noticed until now there were big honkin swastikas on the
| tail.
| gonzus wrote:
| I did notice them as well. I wonder if the original video had
| already been edited so that the swastikas were (in my opinion)
| mostly clipped out, or if this is a more recent edit...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I remember swastikas in the 1970s. I don't think they were
| ever edited out.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Please add "(very poorly)" to the title.
| fitzroy wrote:
| Joseph Goebbels and the Amazing Technicolor Dream-Blimp
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The crazy, crazy fact:
|
| Fatalities 36 (13 passengers, 22 crewmen, 1 bystander) Survivors
| 62 (23 passengers, 39 crewmen)
|
| Looking at the video, you certainly would not expect two thirds
| of the people on board to survive the hellish fire.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed, a little over half a minute from the start of the fire
| to total destruction of the airframe, it is amazing that there
| were that many survivors. Important to note that the crew and
| the airframe itself were two separate components, but that the
| passenger area was embedded in the fuselage.
|
| More miraculously when you have seen that footage is to realize
| that some of the passengers and crew walked away without major
| injury.
| contravariant wrote:
| This happens quite often with accidental explosions I've
| noticed. Explosions are not as lethal as you might expect,
| unless someone deliberately ensured that it caused a lot of
| damage.
| Zuider wrote:
| It was a design flaw. The flames were able to travel quickly
| through the central passage which passed through the center
| of the gas-bladders. The footage shows flames venting from
| the nose of the airship.
| marcodiego wrote:
| It is mostly hydrogen, so most of the energy was dissipated in
| the first few seconds. Most of the other materials or do not
| burn well or have very low thermal capacity. It was not on its
| highest altitude when burning started and drag dumped the
| falling to much slower speeds than a free-falling person.
|
| I'd estimate that most people who died were trapped or unable
| to move. Those who were free to run and had enough "air" were
| very likely to survive.
| Someone wrote:
| Also, hydrogen being much lighter than air, a lot of the
| burning and associated heat was above the zeppelin.
|
| Slightly related question: this film talks about "white hot
| steel". It wasn't steel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duralu
| min#Aviation_application...). Was it white hot?
| userbinator wrote:
| Heat rises, and the passengers were all below the fire. I
| suspect many of the deaths were from being crushed as it
| fell on them.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Hydrogen does not burn energetically, especially before it
| has been mixed with oxygen. The tragedy was caused by the
| coating used on the exterior which was essentially solid
| rocket fuel.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| That theory has been largely discredited. There wasn't
| nearly enough reagents in the fabric to create a large
| thermite reaction. An oxyhydrogen explosion is the most
| likely explanation: there was probably a leak prior to the
| explosion, which allowed air to mix with hydrogen inside
| and surrounding some of the gas bladders. Also, a walkway
| ran through the bladders, which acted as an oxygen source
| once the bladders burst, as evidenced by flames being
| directed through the axial walkway.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster#Incendiar
| y...
| speedybird wrote:
| > _Hydrogen does not burn energetically, especially before
| it has been mixed with oxygen._
|
| Drop the word "especially" and I might agree, but a mere
| party balloon of hydrogen mixed with oxygen in a
| stoichiometric ratio going off will sound like a rifle and
| rattle windows.
| jwiz wrote:
| When I was young, I volunteered at a science museum who
| would, as part of their chemistry show, fill a balloon
| with hydrogen and ignite it off a tesla coil. One time,
| we (~15yo kids) convinced the person giving the show
| (maybe...college age kid?) to also mix O2 in the balloon,
| instead of only H2.
|
| The boom was so loud that management folks on the other
| floors sent people down to see WTF was happening. I don't
| think he got into (much) trouble, but he sure never did
| that again.
| zardo wrote:
| I don't know why this theory is repeated as though it's
| fact. The explanation that a lifting gas bag ruptured,
| mixing it's contents with the air seems a better fit to the
| witness accounts.
| Zuider wrote:
| New footage shows the tail-fins catch fire before the
| gas-bladders erupted. Those tail-fins must, therefore,
| have been quite flammable. The video suggests that the
| trigger for the fire was the release of a large build up
| of static electricity on approaching proximity to the
| ground. An airship is essentially, an oversized Leyden
| jar, and such a build up would cause problems, even for
| ones using helium for lift.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFCgipjR2ow
| [deleted]
| lovecg wrote:
| I've read that most fatalities were people jumping out, and
| those who stayed inside until the burning airship touched
| down mostly walked away.
|
| Edit: that's not quite correct, Wikipedia has a better
| summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster
| mongol wrote:
| Were all in the zeppelin when it caught fire?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| yes. It hadn't landed yet.
| loeg wrote:
| One of the deaths was a ground crewman, Allen Hagaman.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| Apparently, most of the passengers were along the window bay in
| preparation for landing. They were able to hop out of the
| windows as the guest compartment reached a safe distance to the
| ground, and before hot wreckage could fall on them.
|
| The three things that saved them was A) an airship, even one
| leaking and on fire, had a slow enough fall to safely evacuate
| B) the majority of fuel sources were above the crew and guests
| and C) most of the guests had an easy exit.
| jacquesm wrote:
| About half of the guests had an easy exit, the other half
| were on the other side of the airship where the door had
| become jammed, most of the people on that side perished in
| the flames.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I've really come to enjoy these sorts of upscaled videos that
| allow a view of various cities in the early 1900's.
|
| New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85WMpJMv8aA
|
| San Francisco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8
|
| Paris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOPaxhhgyd8
|
| Wuppertal, Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk
| FiberBundle wrote:
| This one of Berlin, though not as early as the ones you posted,
| is the most spectacular one I've found:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_YSDgruADlE
|
| This gives a much better view into what everyday life must have
| been like at that time, it almost reminds me in some ways of
| movies such as Koyaanisqatsi.
| bsenftner wrote:
| In the early 90's I was working in early streamed digital
| video. One of the projects was a history of aviation
| documentary. The original negatives of early flight, including
| the original Wright Brothers flights are lost. But in many
| cases paper print outs of them remain. Before copyright was
| extended to film, to get a copyright a film had to be printed
| to paper. These paper print outs are all that remain. But this
| being the early 90's, there was no machine learning nor a
| formal field of computer vision as we know it now. We
| painstakingly scanned the thousands of feet of printed film,
| and reconstructed them as CLUT-127 (color look up table)
| animations. I seem to remember that project got streaming media
| awards of some sort. It was a long time ago.
| diggan wrote:
| Me too, really interesting to see and easier to connect somehow
| when the quality is better, compared to the black and white
| versions with strange frame-speeds.
|
| Here is another one:
|
| Barcelona, Spain (1911):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-3NlMAdq9I
| the-dude wrote:
| Groningen, The Netherlands :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogsTc9JLfWY
| marcodiego wrote:
| Considering it is entirely automated, this is extremely good.
|
| I'm not a bit against ML restoration. We've been paying artist to
| color BW in the early days, this is just replacing the artist by
| machines.
|
| Judging from the video, it looks like no inter-frame relation is
| considered, so color varies wildly from on frame to another. The
| video still lacks some form of stabilization. Frames still have
| defects inherited from the film.
|
| Also, it clearly was recorded in different speeds, so people have
| an uncanny walk in the last scenes.
|
| I hope, in the not too distant future, these flaws will be taken
| care of and we'll see restorations that are very hard to
| differentiate from original footage.
| xdennis wrote:
| I couldn't possibly disagree more. This is nothing more than
| the digital equivalent of the monkey Jesus restoration:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Mart%C3%ADnez_and_G...
| It's extremely disrespectful. The colours are shifting all over
| the place. At times it's no better than overlaying a random
| gradient over the original.
|
| > We've been paying artist to color BW in the early days, this
| is just replacing the artist by machines.
|
| And some people are very upset over those. (Have you ever
| actually seen classic movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" in
| colour?) But this ML nonsense doesn't even hold a candle to
| those. In the manual process, for every object, they pick a
| colour and stick with it.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| How is this disrespectful if it's just a demo of the tech
| progress?
|
| Are painting artists not allowed to train by repainting
| Picassos until they get good?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Presumably, because they're training on a video of the
| Hindenburg disaster.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sure, you can train all you want, but showing off something
| that is inferior to other things that can already be done
| is just embarassing. At least it should be. There's a
| difference of showing off progress to your parents or
| investors or whatever, but making a public post of
| something clearly inferior in a way that screams "look what
| I did" is sad really.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting. This is a common consumer view. Since pure
| consumers aren't acquainted with anything but the best in
| the field, they demand very high quality of anything they
| witness. That makes sense.
|
| At least part time content creators know that creation is
| harder - because that first step to actually doing
| something is mentally hard (pure consumers find it
| impossible). People will make crappy things before they
| make good things and they'll share them with each other.
|
| Perhaps the problem is when pure consumers, seeking
| further stimulus, enter creator spaces. Or where part-
| creators accidentally expand the audience for their
| fellow creators into pure consumer spaces or more-
| consumer-than-creator spaces like HN.
| wiz21c wrote:
| >> The video still lacks some form of stabilization.
|
| Yeah, I wonder why. Once you are able to create colors, I'd
| think stabilizing the picture must be really easy. And since
| we're doing fancy interpretation (yeah, I say "interpretation"
| 'cos ML can't know the exact colors, just see the craft turning
| red and blue all of the time), then it'd be nice to go to the
| end of it : color, stabilization, speed fixing, the whole
| thing.
|
| Besides, how do we know how such "interpretation" is close or
| far from reality ? What sort of validity testing is done ?
| foobiekr wrote:
| It really isn't very good. It's worse than you'd get from low
| cost hand retouching outsourced to a low cost of labor geo as
| was done in the 80s.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >as was done in the 80s.
|
| as is done to this day. FTFY
| cheschire wrote:
| Maybe then we'll finally get an HD release of Deep Space 9.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Evidently all efforts of the following HN member to improve
| consumer-grade DS9 video has reached an end:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24417255
|
| The studio itself won't commission the necessary professional
| work for an HD (or at least upscaled) re-release.
| boulos wrote:
| He came back to it :).
|
| > Update (7/17/2021): The article below has been superseded
| by the results discussed in "Far Beyond the Stars" and the
| accompanying tutorial, "How to Upscale Star Trek: Deep
| Space Nine." These articles are the latest that I've
| published and the best showcase for my latest work.
|
| [1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/323905-far-beyond-
| the-st...
|
| [2] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/324466-tutorial-
| how-to-u...
| cheschire wrote:
| The article you linked in that thread had an update from
| the same person.
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/324466-tutorial-how-
| to-u...
| scotty79 wrote:
| Lack of temporal consistency for colors is absolutely horrible.
|
| I think it indicates that the problem posed to ML was defined
| wrongly.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Exactly, the upscaling is good but any human intern would
| have fixed the color for free, even by choosing a random one,
| and it would have produced a result closer to expectations...
| tdrdt wrote:
| The channel Rick88888888 has a ton of restored movies:
| https://youtube.com/user/Rick88888888
| xdennis wrote:
| I'd sooner call it vandalism. Restoration is what's shown in
| "They Shall Not Grow Old" where they paid attention to detail
| and approached it with respect.
|
| Sharp edges and shifting red-blue colours is not what I would
| call restoration.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Hahaha, that's their creative touch so they can claim
| copyright on this for the next 70 years
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| It's not vandalism unless the originals have been damaged.
| If someone makes a digital copy and goofs around with it I
| really don't see any harm being done.
| greenail wrote:
| The temporal color jitter is pretty bad, but the other processing
| seemed to crisp it up. Based on my watching two minute papers I
| have to guess they can do better on the temporal consistency of
| the color.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Two more papers down the line, I'm sure they'll be able to fix
| that.
| RotaryTelephone wrote:
| What a time to be alive!
| consumer451 wrote:
| Karoly Zsolnai-Feher is just so darn charismatic. That has
| to be one of the reasons Two Minute Papers[0] has >1M subs.
| Is there anyone in the space even close to that level of
| engagement?
|
| [0]
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| This sent me down a zeppelin Wikihole and led me to a much
| greater appreciation of the engineering and operational
| complexity of these airships. Thanks!
| bsanr wrote:
| Huh. Never noticed the swastikas before.
| marstall wrote:
| a real tragedy, but also a succinct metaphor for Nazi Germany!
| michaelterryio wrote:
| A bunch of the comments in this thread are inappropriate. There's
| no justification for the over-the-top insulting language on this
| forum.
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(page generated 2021-10-16 23:00 UTC)