ESRGAN-PyTorch VS Real-ESRGAN

For perceptual though, as /u/zshn25 points out, the difficult but possibly applicable solution is to build a Convolutional Discriminator as if for training a GAN, and then your own image set with each image having a grade from 0.0 (bad) to 1.0 (great), or whatever range (don't use activation on the output), and then training it with augmentations so hopefully the discriminator can figure out what exactly it is you like and try to project it to a number. This requires you sitting there and making the dataset though.

It's not exactly what you're after, as it's anime specific and you need to process the video yourself (eg disassemble to frames, run the upscaler, then assemble back to a movie file), but Real-ESRGAN is really good:

https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN/

It's pretty brilliant for cleaning up very old, low resolution anime.

Just a note you can run upscaling on your home desktop with Real-ESRGAN:

https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN

Maybe Real-ESRGAN is a good fit? Even tho it's a couple of years old

I'm glad you noticed! I upscaled the icon from the wiki using Real-ESRGAN's 4xplus anime model, then photoshopped out the text. Worked far better than waifu2x.

A: Try using High-res Fix and R-ESRGAN 4x+ Anime6B as upscaler

Maybe try this one https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN it may work even better.

Screenshotted from the official music video, upscaled to 4k using a state of the art ML model.

Do you happen to remember which chapter has that "scene"? You could also try to enhance it yourself, I did it using Real-ESRGAN, which is really easy to use.