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Comment by spooningtamarin | Hacker News Reader

There are extremely large amounts of hardware based implementations. Any more complicated TV upscaler (Sony 4K TVs certainly) probably has a neural network embedded in it.

Any algorithms working with images need FPGA implementations to be quick enough, and there are a lot of convnets in use there.

There's a chapter on convnets here: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/computer-scien...

RNNs are nothing special in particular, at least these with small number of layers and nodes.

HMMs or CRFs are easier to handle for sequences, and would probably work well, and there are FPGAs all over the place of these models.

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Any links to TV upscaler chips using NN algorithms? I couldn't find any.

Also, my impression was that FPGAs are much slower than GPUs for neural nets. Unless you're talking about really high end chips like Stratix 10 from Altera, which cost over $30k. Power consumption is a different matter though.

https://community.sony.co.uk/t5/blog-news-from-sony/inside-4...

They won't tell you it's NNs but it is. Sony distributes a lot of movies, they use their database of movies to train the upscaling models (which is obviously NNs https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x ) and then put the chip in the TV.

It's something almost equivalent to storing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in your TV in 4K, and then reproducing it when they match it with what's playing on TV.

It does not mention anything about neural networks in that link. How do you know? I looked up that Sony chip, and I can't find anything "neural" about it either.

I don't quite understand what you mean by: "It's something almost equivalent to storing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in your TV in 4K, and then reproducing it when they match it with what's playing on TV."

Can you explain? What exactly do they have to store in the TV?

Well, Sony Pictures is huge. Their database of movies is enormous. (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is one of the movies distributed by Sony)

Imagine they stored all of the movies they distribute in 4K in your TV. Whenever the movie is displayed they just find it in the database and reproduce the 4K version.

Of course, that is very much infeasible, it requires too large of a storage.

What they do is something like Waifu2x I linked, they train a neural network to learn how to properly upscale movies. They put the "algorithm" on the chip, and its fast enough for real time usage.

It seems like you're speculating. Unless you're familiar with the details of their chip, your guess is as good as mine.

I don't have to be familiar, you can know state of the art deterministic upscalers and their image quality, and know state of the art statistical upscalers and their image quality.

When you see side-by-side for these upscalers, it's obvious they aren't that good in deterministic upscaling.

One of my favorite named startups ever is working on something likely related to video upscaling: http://www.magicpony.technology/

That page says they are a software company. Are they working on an upscaler chip?

Wow, I was completely unaware that consumer products like TV upscalars were utilizing neural networks. I assume that the upscalar uses the result of a prior training session and doesn't need periodic retraining.

Yeah, I was surprised too when I heard that, but if you had a huge database of HD movies, you could train a NN yourself, see how it upscales, use some algorithms or different error functions to correct weird artifacts and put the trained weights on an FPGA.

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