Title: My open-source machine learning toolbox
Author: Solène
Date: 04 October 2022
Tags: linux opensource machinelearning ml
Description: In this blog post, I share about a few open source project
related to machine learning that I absolutely love.

# Introduction

I recently got interested into what's possible with machine learning
programs, and this has been an exciting journey.  Let me share about a
few programs I added to my toolbox.

They all work well on NixOS, but they might require specific
instructions to work except for upscayl and whisper that are in
nixpkgs.  However, it's not that hard, but may not be accessible to
everyone.

# Whisper

This program analyzes audio content of an audio or video file, and make
a transcript of it.  It supports many languages, I tried it with
English, French and Japanese, and it worked very reliably.

Not only it creates a transcript text file, but it also generates a
subtitles (.srt) file, you can create video subtitles automatically. 
It has a translation function which pass all the transcript text to
Google translate and give you the result in English.

It's quite slow using a CPU, but it definitely works, using a GPU gives
an 80 times speed boost.

It requires a weight to work, it exists in different sizes: tiny,
small, base, medium, large, and each has an English only variant that
is smaller.  It will download them automatically on demand in the
~/.cache/whisper/ directory.

whisper GitHub project page

# Stable-diffusion

This program can be used to generate pictures from a sentence, it's
actually very effective.  You need a weight file which is like a
database on how to interpret stuff in the sentence.

You need an account on
https://huggingface.co/CompVis/stable-diffusion-v-1-4-original to
download the free weight file (4 GB).

stable-diffusion GitHub project page

stable-diffusion GitHub project page with openvino support for CPU based rendering

# DeOldify.NET

This program can be used to colorize a picture.  The weights are
provided.  This works well without a GPU.

I tried to use it on mangas, it works to some extent, it adds some
shading and identify things with colors, but the colorization isn't
reliable and colors may be weird.  However, this improves readability
for me 👍🏻.

DeOldify.NET GitHub project page

# Upscayl

This program upscales a picture to 4 times its resolution, the result
can be very impressive, but in some situation it gives a "plastic" and
unnatural feeling.

I've been very impressed by it, I've been able to improve some old
pictures taken with a poor phone.

Upscayl GitHub project page

# Going further

If you know some tools in that kind that could interest me, please
share! :)  Especially if it's something to colorize mangas 😁.