Intel Labs is a research segment from Intel, this department now has shown a new image enhancement process in Grand Theft Auto V. The program converts the game's image to more photo-realistic images with a complicated procedure using AI.

Most of the Intel Labs team’s data and findings while building this new image enhancement technique is available through their project page on Intel’s website and a very detailed white paper reports polygon.

However, to make things a little easier to grasp, the team also created a video that shows off the process in motion and some of the enhanced footage from the game. The video gives side-by-side comparisons between the standard world of GTA 5 and the enhanced version, generated by Intel Labs. The enhanced image is particularly impressive in terms of details — it fills in reflections from car windows, glossiness in paint, lush grass in previously brown fields, and leaves on barren trees. The Intel team’s secret weapon is actually a check process that runs at the end of the enhancement of each individual frame. The check measures each frame’s accuracy versus a real-life image in-order to make sure that the process continues to meet a certain bar for photorealistic quality. The video also goes into a detailed description of how the process works, and even gives a few visual aids that make it more clear — but you should still expect to wrestle with some academic and technical jargon.

Intel Labs shows photo-realistic image enhancement GTA V done in AI