Designer Daniel Voshart, a virtual reality specialist in the film industry, managed to bring Roman emperors back to life by colorizing them using artificial intelligence and Photoshop.

Machine learning is a remarkable tool for restoring old photos and videos, to the extent that it can even bring ancient statues to life, turning the statues of long-dead Roman emperors into realistic faces you could imagine seeing on the street.

Voshart completed his initial renderings of the first 54 emperors in July, but this week he released updated images and new posters for sale.

Voshart said he originally made 300 posters in his first batch, hoping to sell them within a year, but they sold out within three weeks.

His work has since gone viral, and the designer says: 'I knew Roman history was interesting and that there was an audience for it, but the speed at which this happened still surprised me.'

Voshart used a variety of software and sources to recolor images and statues, with the main tool being a program called ArtBreeder, which uses a machine learning method known as GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) to handle portraits and landscapes.

When browsing the ArtBreeder website, you can see a range of faces in different styles, each adjustable using sliders, similar to a character creation screen in video games.

Voshart fed ArtBreeder with images of emperors he gathered from statues, coins, and paintings, then manually adjusted the images based on historical descriptions and fed them back into the GAN.

He says: 'I work with the help of Photoshop, upload the images to ArtBreeder, adjust them, then bring them back to Photoshop, and then retouch them. That resulted in the best quality of images that are convincing in themselves.'

Each image takes a day to design, and the designer says he sometimes fed high-resolution images of celebrities into the GAN to increase realism.

Voshart says he was not interested in Roman history before starting this project, but delving into the lives of the emperors to depict them changed his mind.

His work has been praised by academics for giving the emperors a new and realistic depth, and Voshart says he has been in touch with a group of history professors and PhD students who provided guidance on specific figures.

He adds: 'Skin color choice is one of the areas where there is a lot of debate, especially with emperors like Septimius Severus, who is believed to have had Phoenician ancestors or possibly indigenous North African ancestry.'

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Artificial intelligence, Photoshop

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August 22, 2020 | Last update: August 22, 2020

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