Security and Pop Culture: Can You Enhance That?

  

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We’re all familiar with that one scene in practically every crime show these days that makes anyone remotely familiar with the security industry roll their eyes - the classic “Zoom and Enhance.” The typical scene starts with surveillance footage shot from 500 feet in the air and a couple detectives determined to solve a heinous crime with less than 15 seconds of grainy black and white footage. One detective catches a reflection in the corner of a pedestrian’s sunglasses and instructs his “video” team to “enhance” the frame, leading to an image clear as day, and effortlessly solving the crime. You may have asked yourself, can this really be done?

Zoom

Today’s PTZ cameras are indeed capable of “CSI” style optical zoom with cameras ranging from 1x to 32x zoom and beyond. The demand for higher resolution video has caught up to the security industry (for the most part) with many manufacturers offering “HD” and megapixel video images. In the video link below, we have an AXIS P553 PTZ Camera in operation – look what it can do zooming in at only 18x!
 

The optical zoom function is only available live, so there isn’t much you can do if your hardware wasn’t at your intended zoom level. If you want to “zoom” in on a still picture or frame, you’re still limited to your hardware specifications. In the picture below, there is an example of the “zoom” capabilities available today. With the higher resolutions available on cameras, you can capture video and a larger area (16:9) without compromising detail.

Enhance

We can enhance… kind of. Enhancement of a still picture can be accomplished using compressed sensing (CS). It’s a mathematical tool capable of creating high-resolution photos from low-resolution shots. At the very basic level, it works by repeatedly layering colored shapes into the areas where there are missing pixels to achieve what’s called sparsity, a measure of image simplicity. In the far right part of the image below, 10% of the pixels exist and CS is used to make a sensible image. Currently, this technology is being researched for medical (MRI) and military (radar) applications.

Fortunately, if you just have noisy or grainy video (not incomplete like the example above) there is help available today. Thanks to products like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premier with plug-ins like Neat Video and Topaz Enhance, we can easily remove the noise and produce a usable clip. While many ways to remove or reduce noise exist, the most common method of noise reduction is to apply noise reduction to each frame. If you have more than one image of the same item (video frames), you can layer the two and apply image de-noising to both images and then combine them. The more technical names of these methods are Spatial (noise reduction in each frame), Temporal (noise reduction between frames), and Spatial-Temporal (a combination of both).

Topaz enhance is a plug-in that uses Temporal video de-noising. Watch the whole video, or skip over to 3:55 to watch it process each frame, and then produce a before and after clip. 

So, yes, we are able to zoom, and we’re able to enhance. But, as you’ve seen above, don’t count on CSI’s pseudo-scientific enhancement to be available any time soon.

- Joelle Katz