Collection of models for use in restoration and upscaling of the TV series "Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?" from the 1990s. While primarily consisting of cel-based animation, the show also incorporates live-action (including stock footage and scenes involving "The Player"), 3D CGI (primarily used for the C5 Corridor), and 2D computer animation. The models are divided into two groups:

* Deinterlace Fix
* Upscaling

The deinterlacing fox models are primarily designed for the 2012 Mill Creek release, where a number of episodes have some rather harsh forced deinterlacing, which the models attempt to repair. These models may also be useful for improving picture quality in some scenes (primarily in seasons 3 and 4) that used deinterlacing as part of compositing multiple layers of images, and for improving the results of deinterlacing by QTGMC or other processes.

Speaking of deinterlacing, for episodes in 480i, I recommend using QTGMC to deinterlace them to 60 (59.97) fps, the frame rate of the live-action and (some) C5 Corridor footage. For the pre-deinterlaced episodes, you're going to be stuck at 30 fps since the other-frame information has already been removed. Despite this series being primarily cel-based animation, I **don't** recommend using 24 fps as it tends to make higher-framerate portions look odd.

The upscaling models work pretty much how you would expect.

Each model has a small and large variant. The large variants are based on the OmniSR architecture, and tend to produce better results (marginally so in the case of the deinterlacing fix), but are several times slower than the small models, which use the compact architecture.

Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?

This model corrects jagged lines on animation that has been deinterlaced. It handles simple line doubling, line interpolation, and even Yadif-style artifacts. It can also handle sources that were resized after deinterlacing, for example resizing from ntsc to pal resolutions. If a source has been upscaled after deinterlacing, it will need to be downsized before applying this model.

AnimeUndeint Compact

A fast upscaler that is a replacement for standard methods of cleaning noise from the picture. Ideal for BDRemux 720p and 1080p, but only if the noise is monochrome or close to it. So far, attempts are underway to create a dataset that could eliminate color noise at the same speed.

1x BW Denoise

Category: VHS Tapes
Purpose: VHS

Fixing minor VHS Chroma and Pattern Noise - NOTE: only works on deinterlaced sources

BaldrickVHSFix V0.2

This model helps repair color bleed and heavy chroma noise that may be present on some older footage, particularly that which was recorded on VHS. It also cleans up rainbows if they are present.

BleedOut Compact

Purpose: Cartoons

This is a simple retrain of SaurusX's 1x_BroadcastToStudioLite_485k model from a couple years ago. This one is trained on compact, actually has less artifacts, and is significantly faster.

__Comparisons:__ <https://slow.pics/c/oGwHyYym>
![1733071729 5752351](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f247b870-d49e-4c37-ad39-c4565efe164d)

BroadcastToStudio Compact

This is SaurusX's original description:
Improvement of low-quality cartoons from broadcast sources. Will greatly increase the visual quality of bad broadcast tape sources of '80s and '90s cartoons (e.g. Garfield and Friends, Heathcliff, DuckTales, etc). Directly addresses chroma blur, dot crawl, and rainbowing. You're highly advised to take care of haloing beforehand in your favorite video editor as the model will not fix it and may make existing halos more noticeable.

-------

Sadly this model has some intense artifacts. Thankfully the SPAN re-train reduced these a bit, but they're still problematic. This was just a quick test of SPAN's capabilities. This was trained only to ~66k iterations, compared to the 480k of the original.

BroadcastToStudio_SPAN

This model was trained on lossless video frames of Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, compressed with Bink V1 for the LR frames. It's a lot more efficient than my first DeBink model, and also has less artifacts. It's not quite as robust, but the compression is barely noticeable in videos after processing with this.

Sample video: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/903415274521374750/904129653374078976/XB_Demo_Mov-85600_G.mp4

DeBink Lite

This model removes early 2000s Bink and other compression artifacts. Works well on almost any image or video compression type.

DeBink v4

DeBink v5

DeBink v6

Incomplete lite model to remove ROQ compression

DeRoqBeta-lite

Wipes out dot crawl and rainbows in animation.

Dotzilla Compact

Category: DeToon
Purpose: Detooning

An attempt to detoon images/drawings of people

DoubleDetoon

Purpose: artifact

This model attempts to make films upscaled to 4K with Topaz Gaia-HQ look more natural and filmic. It sharpens, adds film grain, and smooths out small artefacts from the upscaling process. I recommend adding a tiny amount of grain to the input to seed the model (you can do this in VEAI), otherwise the film grain will remain static across frames that don't move much. Pretrain model used with permission to relicense from Twittman.

Filmify4K v2

This is a sharpening/deblurring model for anime video. It was created with three goals in mind:
Be blazing fast
Try to avoid enhancing noise and compression artifacts
Try to avoid over-enhancing intentionally blurred parts of the image

Despite that last point, this is not intended to be used on modern anime which makes heavy of use depth-of-field effects.

HurrDeblur SuperUltraCompact

Takes composite/RF/VHS NES footage and attempts to restore it to RGB quality. Assumes footage has been properly deinterlaced via field duplication from 240p to 480p/720p/etc. Note that:

* All footage was captured in 240p/480p/720p NTSC.
* RGB footage was captured via an AV Famicom with the RGB Blaster via the Retrotink 2x or GBS Control.
* The model was trained exclusively on individual frames, so it can't fix things like dropouts.
* The even and odd fields of NES composite tend to be a bit...different from each other, so there will be some jitter at 60fps.
* I don't have access to an NES Toploader, so I wouldn't expect it to fix the jailbars very well.

Revision History:

* 1.5.0 (06/29/2025): Applied additional augmentations to reduce overfitting. Also added a small amount of 720p training data.
* 1.0.0 (11/03/2024): Initial release.

NES Composite to RGB

Purpose: Texturizing

Tries to reverse heavy h264 compression. Fails. Can be used to texturize images though.

NMKD h264Texturize

A fast upscaler that is a replacement for standard methods of cleaning noise from the picture. Ideal for BDRemux or WEB-DL 720p or 1080p it. It gets rid of floral noise well, the smaller its grain size, the more uniform the resolution for all videos will be. If you need a more stable video, then you can also add 2x-DigitalFlim-SuperUltraCompact after this upscaler. My upscaler can slightly simplify the geometry of very small objects.

1x RGB max Denoise

This model decompresses images and video compressed using RoQ. Config and presets will be added when Mega decides to let me use their site!

RoQ_nRoll

Purpose: Upscaling older cartoons

This is yet another retrain of SaurusX's SwatKats_Lite model. The dataset was reprocessed with my [Find Misaligned Images](<https://github.com/Kim2091/helpful-scripts/tree/main/Find%20Misaligned%20Images>) script, along with the new [ImgAlign](<https://github.com/sonic41592/ImgAlign>) update, which drastically reduced artifacts and increased the model's capabilities. This particular model is roughly on par with or slightly behind the original, doing better in some spots and worse in others. Refer to the attached examples to see this.

The advantage of this over the original is the speed improvement of Compact over ESRGAN-lite. In a 480p test on an RTX 4090, the original ESRGAN-lite model took 0.28 seconds to process a frame vs Compact's 0.13 seconds.

https://slow.pics/s/dF3Icjpv

OR

<https://imgsli.com/MjQxMzc1/0/1>

SwatKats Compact

Category: VHS Tapes
Purpose: VHS

Best when used on cartoons, it can work on anime. Due to the dataset it does struggle a bit with orange colors and grainy dark spots. This model is meant to be used to clean up the image before using it on a 2x or 4x model. Example with 2x-BIGOLDIES https://imgsli.com/OTQ0NjM/1/0.

ToonVHS

Category: VHS Tapes
Purpose: VHS

Make old VHS footage crispy. This model will **not** work on video and images with noticeable JPEG/Video compression artifacts, noticeable interlacing or haloing, heavy tape distortion/artifacts and scenes with tons of detail. For best results, use a downscaled HD capture of the VHS tape you intend to use it on.

VHS-Sharpen

The "Complete Series" release of "Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?" by Mill Creek has a number of episodes that suffer from some rather harsh deinterlacing. This model attempts to restore the footage to something closer to a more advanced deinterlacing job. It may also be useful on episodes (primarily found in seasons 3 & 4) that were produced with advanced compositing where certain layers used similar forced deinterlacing techniques, and for cleaning up artifacts left by Yadif, QTGMC, etc.

Revision History:
* v1.1.0: Added data to improve handing of certain situations, particularly in season 3.
* v1.0.0: Initial release.

Where On Earth-Deinterlace Fix-Large

Where On Earth-Deinterlace Fix-Small

Removal of Compression such as Cinepak, msvideo1 and Roq

cinepak

Upscaling model for 1990s cartoon series "Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?" May also be useful for other shows of that era.

Note: Before using this model, you will need to either:
* Deinterlace the episodes (I recommend QTGMC on Slower) to 60 fps (I recommend 60 fps because that's the rate of the live-action footage and some other components).
* Repair the existing deinterlacing via one of the related models for this show.
Which method will depend on the episode and release. See the related deinterlacing models for details.

This show is...complicated. Unlike, say, the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, where live action and animated segments are generally separated into large chunks, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego repeatedly switches between live-action, traditional animation, 3D CGI, 2D computer graphics, stock photography, and other sources, sometimes combining them in the same frame. As such, rather than create multiple models for each type, I've created a single model for all footage types.

Known Weaknesses:
* The model performs less well on the live-action (Player) and 3D CGI (C5 Corridor) segments due to a scarcity of usable data in those scenes.
* I don't own the 2025 DVD release, so I can't comment on how well this model works on that footage.

Architecture	Compact
Scale	1x
Color Mode	RGB
License	MIT Private use Commercial use Distribution Modifications Credit required No Liability & Warranty Disclaimer
Date	2025-06-29
Dataset	Cross-referenced frames between the Shout Factory and Mill Creek DVD releases
Dataset size	111
Training iterations	186634
Training batch size	8
Training HR size	128

Where On Earth-Deinterlace Fix-Small

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