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Birdman Adam

Pull out more detail from your CCTV images!

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Many people come to the forum looking for help in bringing out details in their images - usually after something bad has happened. One of the most common is trying to re-focus, sharpen, or deinterlacing a license-plate image. Unfortunately, this is not "CSI". There is no magic! BUT, there are things we can do to bring out a bit more detail - possibly enough to get you something that will help in an investigation.

 

Here is a crappy license plate picture, with a lot of motion blur:

 

deinterlacefocusmagic1-1.jpg

 

That image is about 50px wide, by 23px tall. Can you read it? No. Now download Gimp (free), crop the image to the details you want, and deinterlace the image - choosing the best fields:

 

gimpdeinterlace-1.png

 

After deinterlacing:

 

deinterlace-1.jpg

 

Already much better! That interlacing is common in crappy systems... Now I will show you some free software I found, called Focus magic. There is not much more to be done, but this helps some. Choose the Focus filter. Click on the image to do a preview. It wants you to pay to do the whole image, but we don't need to do that - just a segment! It will suggest the best blur width and amount of focusing to be done. Play with both, although the defaults it chooses are usually best.

 

magic-1.png

 

The final image:

 

focusmagic-1.png

 

Comparison:

 

deinterlacefocusmagic1-1.jpgdeinterlace-1.jpgfocusmagic-1.png

 

There are other things that can be done (Rory I know you had some examples?). As you can see, its not like in CSI! But even with this horrible pixel size that was captured, I now have at least a partial plate - probably 11244, with north carolina's "mountain environmental support plate" (green with the bear).

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equalize brightness, sharpen more

 

enlarge, sharpen, negative image ...

 

 

equalize brightness, sharpen more, enlarge, equalize, sharpen more ... etc

 

negative image helps in some cases but not in this one

focusmagic2.png.c4b3c47cbff99612ac60048ac2642200.png

focusmagic3.png.621a76da10eddcb404bab24bb93a5167.png

focusmagic.png.dc0570cd41a8c0b13e86e3138c645790.png

focusmagic1.png.a03ac5753386ec3548f4203e79960473.png

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Hi all, so i have a problem. I posted previously for an awful Netrome Blackbox system. Today I have a different issue. I have three avi videos (approx 4min) that show a car causing damage to my property. I am quite the novice with security camera images and am unable to pull the plate number from the video. Would anyone be willing to help me please? I can email the videos. I tried many suggestions and even the video tweaks in VLC but no luck. If anyone is willing to try, please email me at shawndave1@gmail.com. I appreciate any help anyone can offer.

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