Real-ESRGAN
xinntao/Real-ESRGAN · Python · BSD-3-Clause
Practical super-resolution for photos, anime and frames
Real-ESRGAN is still the go-to open upscaler before publishing assets or feeding frames into a video pipeline.
Score
Setup at a glance
pip install realesrgan Deep dive
Real-ESRGAN is the practical blind super-resolution workhorse: it restores and upscales real-world photos, anime art and video frames without knowing in advance what kind of degradation the input has.
It ships two interfaces — a portable ncnn-vulkan executable that runs anywhere with no Python setup, and a Python inference script for pipeline integration — plus dedicated model families for anime videos and general images (realesr-general-x4v3).
It is one of those tools that quietly powers half the upscaling pipelines in the wild; the repo documents the models, training and testing setups.