Rezzy: Zoom and Enhance for images on the web 🔎✨

Webcomic Zoom and Enhance.

Sometimes the text in a web comic is a little too small to read comfortably.
Zooming in normally makes the text blurry, so it's not much help.

Rezzy is a browser extension that automatically enhances the resolution of images on the web, using machine learning (powered by waifu2x-converter-cpp).

Image credit: Sleepless Domain

Machine learning is cool, but it's important to make it accessible, and get it into the hands of the masses.

Bonus feature: navigate any web comic with arrow keys

THIS EXTENSION IS NOT RELEASED YET

Development Setup

• Install Git if you don't already have it.
• Install Git Large File Storage if you don't have it.
• Clone the repo.
• Install Node.js if you don't have it, then open up a command prompt / terminal in the project directory.
• Install project dependencies with npm install
• For Linux (not needed on Windows), run the following:

  sudo apt-get update -y
  sudo apt-get install -y libopencv-core-dev libopencv-imgcodecs-dev
  sudo ldconfig -v
  # Hack it so waifu2x-converter-cpp can find the ML model.
  sudo ln -s "$(pwd)/waifu2x-DeadSix27-win64_v531/models_rgb/" /usr/local/share/waifu2x-converter-cpp
  # Trick it into thinking it's OpenCV 4.2, if that's not what got installed. Might be better to actually install 4.2, but 4.5 seems to work with this:
  sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopencv_imgcodecs.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopencv_imgcodecs.so.4.2
  sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopencv_imgproc.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopencv_imgproc.so.4.2
  sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopencv_core.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopencv_core.so.4.2
  

• Start the superresolution server with npm start
• For Firefox, run npx web-ext run in the project directory
  • It will open a window with the extension temporarily installed.
  • When you make changes:
    • It will automatically reload the extension.
    • You need to reload pages you're testing on to get the updated content script.
• For Chrome or Chromium, type chrome://extensions in the address bar
  • Turn on Developer mode
  • Click "Load unpacked" and select the root of this repository as the folder
  • When you make changes:
    • You need to click the Reload button in the Extensions page
    • Then reload pages you're testing on to get the updated content script.

Usage

• Visit a webcomic, such as Paranatural... well, maybe that's not the best example, at the beginning, but it works really well once the art gets better. Kill Six Billion Demons, Sleepless Domain
• Click on the extension icon in the browser toolbar, and click the power button in the popup to enable the extension for the current site
• (Check the server logs to see if it's working - or, if you hear your computer's cooling fans whirring into motion, it's probably working.)
• Wait for it to buffer several pages before reading