As exciting and thrilling as it is to watch all the historic footage from the Apollo Moon landings, you have to admit, the quality is sometimes not all that great.
Even though NASA has worked on restoring and enhancing some of the most popular Apollo footage, some of it is still grainy or blurry.
But now, new developments in artificial intelligence have come to the rescue, providing viewers a nearly brand new experience in watching historic Apollo video.
A photo and film restoration specialist, who goes by the name of DutchSteamMachine, has worked some AI magic to enhance original Apollo film, creating strikingly clear and vivid video clips and images.
“I really wanted to provide an experience on this old footage that has not been seen before,” he told Universe Today.
Take a look at this enhanced footage from an Apollo 16 lunar rover traverse with Charlie Duke and John Young, where the footage that was originally shot with 12 frames per second (FPS) has been increased to 60 FPS:
Stunning, right? And I was blown away by the crisp view of the Moon’s surface in this enhanced view of Apollo 15’s landing site at Hadley Rille:
Or take a look at how clearly Neil Armstrong is visible in this enhanced version of the often-seen “first step” video from Apollo 11 taken by a 16mm video camera inside the Lunar Module:
Wow, just incredible!
The AI that DutchSteamMachine uses is called Depth-Aware video frame INterpolation, or DAIN for short. This AI is open source, free and constantly being developed and improved…
