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Zapp: Why's it still blurry?! Kif: That's all the resolution we have. Making it bigger doesn't make it clearer. Zapp: It does on CSI: Miami.
"Zoom in. Now... enhance."
The "Enhance" button on the computer is able to turn a tiny, blurred, grainy image in a photo or video into a clear, unmistakable piece of evidence. This process is virtually instantaneous unless added dramatic tension is required (in which case extra Techno Babble or more Applied Phlebotinum may be needed). May require someone to stand next to the computer intoning "Enhance.... enhance..." for full effect.
Now there are real techniques that vaguely fit under the category of "image enhancement" that can enable one to see details in a picture that's blurry, grainy, dark, overexposed, etc..., but this use of "image enhancement" ignores the fact that the big blocky pixels you get when you zoom in too close on a picture are the only information that the picture actually contains, and attempting to extract more detail than this is fundamentally impossible: No matter what you do or how you do it, you're merely "guessing", if not making stuff up outright.
Sometimes this is Hand Waved, where the enhanced image is still blocky/blurry, but a higher-up will instruct the techie to "clean it up" using their mad computer skillz, and then it becomes close-up quality. In reality, the techie is the one who is "making things up", by analyzing at the picture and making educated guesses about what is probably there. It's like attempting to guess the exact words on a missing page from a book, based on what was said in the surrounding pages — it's ultimately just a guess, and certainly not proof admissible in court. Even tasks such as attempting to colorize a black-and-white print are ultimately nothing more than complicated analysis and careful guesswork about what should be what.
In some particularly jarring examples of an Enhance Button, the computer technician may even be able pull off feats such as mapping the back of a suspect's head to a 3D wireframe model and then rotate it by 180 degrees to reveal their face — details that were never actually recorded on camera at all.
A technique called deconvolution can be used to reverse certain kinds of blurring (whether from being out-of-focus or motion blur), but this requires some very detailed knowledge of the individual camera's optics, and this still requires some guesswork to tell if a subtle change in color was due to a detail being blurred, or was actually a subtle change of color captured in sharp focus.
Astronomers are also known for constructing higher resolution images (with less noise) from a sequence of multiple lower quality images; however this is still limited to the maximum resolution of the telescope used. With a technique called Super Resolution + No really, that's what it's called you can maybe quadruple the resolution of a series of images by essentially undoing the antialiasing, but things which were out of focus still are. A similar technique can be used to combine details from multiple frames of a video into a single higher resolution image.
Additionally, many 3D games and graphics software packages use Dynamic Loading techniques. This involves displaying a "thumbnail", a pixelated, lower-resolution version of an image, until the full-size image fully loads. Zooming in may reveal more detail than the downscaled version, but only up to the image's original, actual resolution.
Finally, traditional film actually has a very high resolution due to the extremely small size of photoreactive grains ("pixels", if you will) that compose the surface; better scanning methods can reveal more detail (up to five times HD resolution for 35mm film), but again, this is detail that is actually present on the original; no scanner can capture details smaller than one individual grain, the film's ultimate resolution limit.
These examples, combined with the perceived magic of computers, are most likely where Hollywood got the idea.
Without exception, the Enhance Button is a standard feature of the Everything Sensor, which also tends to come bundled with Facial Recognition Software and a Magical Database to help it out. Also compare Rewind, Replay, Repeat, which is used under similar circumstances but is a lot more realistic.
An enterprising troper has edited together a montage of the abuses of this trope covering many of the film and live action TV examples: Let's Enhance
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Parodied in a Honey and Clover episode, in which one of the characters pauses, rewinds, enlarges, and enhances the face behind the waterfall of one of his own memories. It works, naturally, although it helps that he was obsessed with the character in question.
- An episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex called "Interceptors" had almost an exact reference to the similar scene from Blade Runner mentioned below; the terminology used by the voice-activated photo-enhancement program is even identical, with Togusa saying lines like "Enhance 32 to 50" just as Deckard does.
- Best part: the enhancing does bupkis for the investigation. Togusa's Eureka Moment comes after hours of pointless enhancing when he comes to a picture of a mirror that doesn't reflect a camera. This is when he realizes that the pictures were taken with the (minimally-enhanced) subject's eyes. Someone lo-jacked the subject with Nanomachines!
- Pokémon: Mewtwo Returns does this at the beginning. They get a grainy image of Mewtwo standing on a mountain and then they keep enhancing it so it becomes clearer.
- In Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 episode 7, a worker in an undersea base discovers that his wife is cheating on him when he enhances a video message from her and sees a naked man sitting on her bed reflected in the bezel of her watch.
- Averted in 20th Century Boys: Fujiki and Yoshitsune have some old pictures magnified so Kyoko will have an easier time identifying someone in them, but as she points out it doesn't help much because that makes them a lot more blurry.
Comic Books
- In issue #11 of the original Marvel run of The Transformers, Shockwave accesses Rumble's brain to know if he saw anyone breaking into the captured Ark. He enhances a pixelated image of Buster Witwicky, too small to be noticed by Rumble the first time.
Film
Literature
- A character does this by hand in a Babysitters Club novel: After she's blown up a couple photos as much as she can and still can't make out a background detail, she photographs the pictures and then blows those photos up, resulting in a perfectly clear and damning piece of evidence.
- In Feet of Clay, one of the Discworld Watch books, parodies this with a sort of Victorian-era proto-CSI making an imp paint smaller and smaller portions of a picture of the victim's eyes, eventually revealing the burned-in image of the last thing he saw. This is actually a more reasonable example: the imp is the main component of a Magitech camera, at close range, and winding the lenses out to zoom in further with each shot. What we call in reality "zooming in".
- Handwaved in Dirty Martini by J. A. Konrath, where a tech-savvy police grunt drops some Techno Babble to describe how they were able to filter and blow up a grainy picture until it became legible.
- Artemis Fowl uses the C Cube to enhance low quality video into much more higher one. Handwaved as it's fairy technology.
- In one of the Tom Swift novels, saboteurs take out a camera under their boat. To prove it was deliberate, they use the Enhance Button on its last (blurry) image to reveal the knife that cut the cord.Lampshaded in that they discuss that the computer is pretty much just making stuff up to fill the missing data, but otherwise played straight.
- In Rick Cook's The Wizardry Cursed, a group of high-ranking U.S. Air Force officers take a perfectly good picture of a dragon, complete with dragon rider, decide that it is "out of focus", and "enhance" it until it looks like an image of what they figure is some new top-secret Soviet stealth airplane. By the time they break for dinner they are arguing over the serial numbers on the tail. The enhancement process is actually plausible even though it leads to ludicrous results, so this is probably a subversion as well as an aversion.
- The Cam Jansen series is a series of books for kids in which the titular heroine uses her "photographic memory" to solve minor crimes. Although the testimony of a 10-year-old would already be unlikely to convince (or convict) anyone of anything, in one story, she is able to concentrate enough on a "photograph" of a memory to read the address on a magazine carried by someone walking by, utterly destroying any semblance of believability.
- Averted in Animorphs. Ax has set up a device that can record all TV shows at once. When Marco thinks he sees an Andalite on a TV show, he visits Ax and they replay the show revealing that, yep, it's an Andalite. But there's not enough detail for the heroes to figure out who the Andalite is. Marco suggests zooming in (which Ax's device can do) and enhancing the image, but Ax protests that he can't get any better detail than what he has without the original video reel.
- Subverted in Scott Westerfeld's So Yesterday. The protagonist asks a friend who works in computer graphics to blow up and enhance a low-quality picture from a cell phone camera; the friend explains that this is impossible. She does zoom in so that it's incomprehensible pixels, but then shows how blurring the photo can actually make it more comprehensible.
- In the Jack Reacher novel "Die Trying" by Lee Child, the FBI takes the security footage of a crime, isolates the faces, and then mathematically rotates the side shots to be full face images. Averted because the technician explicitly uses words like "hypothetically" and "simulation", points out that the algorithm assumes that people's faces are mostly symmetrical, and states that if one of the people was missing an ear or had a scar they wouldn't be able to get that part right. The FBI lead investigator accepts the limitations but finds that the results are actually helpful in the case.
- Michael Connelly's The Narrows averts this trope. Our protagonist detective, who knows little of computers, asks another character to "enhance" a digital picture this way only to be told that it's impossible.
Live-Action TV
- Admittedly it's a very impressive pause; you almost never see a pause like that on standard consumer VCRs. No, seriously, have you ever tried pausing on a frame with a normal VCR? It doesn't really help in making things clearer. High-end VCRs have a digital freeze frame that remembers the last clear picture before the pause, but this never became a standard feature on home units.
Video Games
- Partially subverted in Case 4 of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - a "blown-up" photograph still doesn't show the faces of those in it, as the shadows in the original photo weren't affected by enlarging, but it still becomes vital evidence for another reason.
- It's also a valid application of 'zooming and enhancing' - the photo in question is a film photo, not digital, so the blown-up image was made by creating a whole new photo from the negative, not by zooming into an existing photo.
- Parodied in Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1: Guybrush is using a analog optical telescope, and asks his first mate to "enhance the upper right quadrant" - the first mate just turns the telescope to increase the zoom. Guybrush then asks for "full enhancement" and the first mate holds up a second telescope at the end of the first one.
- The video game Blade Runner allows you to do the same enhance as the movie. In fact, you have to do it in order to get the clues you need. Very cool.
- Nod's introduction to Umagon in Tiberian Sun has Slavik and Oxanna examining recently-recorded footage, and ordering CABAL to "extrapolate the missing data" (by deleting the bandana off Umagon's face). It's not quite facial recognition software as neither of them knows who she is at that point.
Western Animation
Webcomics
- Parodied by Nedroid in Crime Lab. Luckily, the killer's face just happens to be a 4x4 block of pixels and compression artifacts.
- Played for laughs in this Goats strip
- Played with in Shortpacked! : Batman has an image enhanced more and more to see the culprit's face, to the point of zooming on a spoon a passer-by just happens to be holding at the right angle... Just to realize everybody's face looks the same anyway.
- In The Way of the Metagamer, Joel Robinson invents a justified version of this trope.
- El Goonish Shive averts this trope, and parody's CSI's usage of it in this comic's commentary.
Of course, if this was CSI, some dude would magically multiply the resolution of the image, clean it up, and get the license plate of a nearby car from a reflection in Elliot's pupil.
- Parodied in this Bug comic.
"Hey! Less whining, more enhancing."
- Parodied in Housepets!, here.
Web Original
- LoadingReadyRun mocked this phenomenon in their CSI parody. In the video, a lab tech uses a new software package to restore a security tape that was wiped with a magnet. However, the culprit is facing away from the camera, so he zooms in on the toaster and enhances the pixels, creating a crystal-clear picture of the toaster, but with no reflection. He runs a filter to find the reflection, extrapolates it into a full photograph, flips it, and zooms in a second time to get an image of the perp's name tag.
- This Picture
- Mocked in the pseudo-documentary of Shoggoth On The Roof, one investigator watches an old Super-8 film of a performance over and over again. He notices a strange figure standing in the background who no one really pays attention to ("Maybe he was the writer?"). He asks a technical person: "Can we enhance this photo to get a better image of this man's face?" She laughs, then tells him they can't. He sighs and then asks if they can just take a really good freeze-frame.
Real Life
- There are actual image-enhancement techniques that can do things like see what a person is looking at by distortion-correcting the reflections in their eyeballs, or reconstruct a scene from the point of view of the light illuminating the scene, but they generally require extremely high-resolution images as a starting point.
- The real technique of super-resolution can produce higher-resolution images from a sequence of low-res images shifted by fractions of a pixel (which naturally occurs during video recording). The levels of enhancement seen in fiction are still ridiculous compared to this, though.
- A little statistical analysis, Photoshop, and Javascript are all that's needed to recover text down to as little as three pixels in height. Law enforcement has access to software which specializes in recovering somewhat distorted license plates, though it's not magic and doesn't do any good if the license plate in question is completely blown out, or is simply too distorted.
- The software is now available as a Photoshop plugin so the general public has access to it too.
- A technique featured in CSI was actually used in Real Life to solve the murder of a cop who had been gunned down during a routine traffic stop. TV display screens usually cut off a few pixels at the end of each image. Analysts were able to get what the patrol car's camera filmed beyond the edge of the normal display area by simply moving the image around with the control on the monitor (re-centering the display a few degrees to the right). The resulting image showed the shooter in action, who had previously been just out of frame.
- Many of the customers such as those featured on Clients From Hell seem to think the Enhance Button will solve all their problems. This happens occasionally in print shops because the customer is Not Always Right.
- One misinformed customer asked to have someone cropped out of the foreground of a photo to see what was behind him.
- Another provided a photo of the front of a house, with instructions to "Rotate 180 degrees, so I can see the back of the house."
- Also: "Please remove this cow so I can see the face of my ancestor!"
- And: "We need to see this person's face [points to person in photo with their back to a camera]. You need to turn the person around 180 degrees."
- Cutting edge face recognition techniques can identify a person from a pool of hundreds with 90% accuracy from a single 12 pixel by 10 pixel mugshot (and reject faces not from the pool). Completely unlike an "Enhance Button", it's good at matching faces while ignoring confounding details like sunglasses, stubble, or partial occlusion, rather than offering any sort of image enhancement.
- Bad focus or motion blur can, in fact, be run through deconvolution filters to get slightly better focus. This can, in theory, be used to help make out details, but there is still no getting around any information genuinely lost by the initial defects and the filters will never make the image as clear as it was if had been taken in focus ion the first place.
- INTERPOL caught a pedophile who was abusing children in Thailand in 2008 after putting out a hue and cry over the Internet. He could be found because a spiral blur had been used to hide his face; this kind of blur does not destroy very much photographic information at all, and reversing the process could be easily accomplished by anyone who knows how to use a Photoshop filter and has the time.
- Compressed sensing is a real life Enhance Button for fuzzy, corrupted images. It uses a series of mathematical tricks to make a perfect image out of, of all things, a random 10% of the pixels in the corrupted image.
- Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5. It's WITCHCRAFT!
- Revel in the enormity of this 70 GIGAPIXEL image of the Budapest skyline. Yes, 70 Gigapixels, complete with inbuilt "ENHANCE!" app: http://70gigapixel.cloudapp.net/
- Computational photography, the science of digital photo analysis, can now allow specialized cameras to see around corners. The camera itself casts a laser light on a surface so it's reflected around the corner, then captures and maps the returning "echo" of the laser.
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