Computer, enhance! Edge is getting a bit of movie magic, as Microsoft confirms that it is developing an image enhancing technology for the web browser.
Not quite the miracle worker that you see on films and TV shows, but close enough.
The cliché in entertainment is of genius investigators seeing an extremely blurry element on a screen and asking their support assistant to enhance it. And voila! It results in a crystal-clear image of a person or object in the photo.
Microsoft’s technology leverages its machine learning technology to enhance the quality of the images being displayed in the web browser.
Eric Lawrence explains in a dedicated blog post on this new feature for Edge that the company is currently calling “SuperRes” or “Enhance Images” technology. And as of now, only a small percentage of users using Edge Stable, Dev, and Canary have this capability enabled via trial flags.
This machine learning model works on the color, lighting, and contrast of an image in order to make it look better.
The important thing to note here is that this image enhancement does not happen locally in the web browser. Microsoft uses the Turing Image Super-Resolution model built by the Microsoft Turing team that is hosted on the cloud to dynamically improve image quality.
This post here has more details if you are interested in monitoring the communication Edge conducts with this cloud service with this feature enabled through Fiddler.
Lawrence does note that the model is not quite perfect just yet. It does not work that well with PNG images and leaves pink, fuzzy artifacts. Nor does it cater to the ICCv4 color profiles correctly either. These are still early days, of course.
There’s no word yet on when — or if — this image enhancement technology will be generally available for all users of the Edge web browser.
But you can check if you have it by heading over to edge://flags and enabling Enhance images in Microsoft Edge. If it is enabled you will see an “HD” icon in the omnibox that can be leveraged to toggle image enhancement.
