Zoom in and enhance — for real
It’s a running joke in our house: Police dramas where the good guys have a low-quality picture of something (maybe a sticker in a car window a mile away), and the cop says to the geek, “Can you zoom in and enhance that?” Lo and behold, suddenly the image is crystal clear.
But a company called MotionDSP has almost made that reality, at least with video. See, when video is compressed it gets pixelated and blurry. The compression software has to throw out a lot of data to make the file smaller. Cheap cameras are the worst, which is why you can barely recognize things in a lot of surveillance videos.
What MotionDSP does is analyze each frame of the movie, then use adjacent frames to make an educated guess what’s missing. It make sense. Compression software uses an algorithm to remove data based on surrounding pixels. MotionDSP reverses that process, in a sense by guessing the logic used by the compressor.
The results are astounding. You can see some example movies at the Motion DSP site, but here’s a screengrab sample:
