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alt title(s): Computer Clairvoyance "Enhance. Enhance. Enhance."
PHD Comics , "If TV Science was more like real science"
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 called for in which case extra Techno Babble or more Applied Phlebotinum may be needed.
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 contains, and extracting details that the original recording didn't contain is fundamentally impossible - that is, unless one were to extrapolate (a big fancy word in statistical analysis which basically means " we're making it up as we go along").
Sometimes this is HandWaved, where the enhanced image is still blocky/blurry, a higher-up will tell the techie to "clean it up" using their madd computer skillz. and then it becomes close-up quality. In reality, any techie or automated system capable of doing something like this would essentially be making things up — looking at a blurry picture and drawing in details that they guess are there (once again, extrapolation). The day may come when computerized "image reconstruction" is capable of making up something plausible using methods like this, but it would be akin to guessing what a missing page in a book said based on the surrounding pages — just a guess, and certainly not proof admissible in court.
In some particularly jarring examples, they will even be able to change the focus of the image. Adding color to a black-and-white image (which, in real life, consists of deciding what color you want something to be and painting it in) or drawing a wireframe around an object and rotating it to see what the back of it looks like are also common, and equally involve techniques that in real life could only consist of making things up.
If you're working with undeveloped film, the basic idea is actually possible — better scanning methods reveal more detail, up to five times the resolution of HD on 35 mm film. This, combined with the perceived magic of computers, is most likely where Hollywood got the idea.
Every Everything Sensor, bar none, comes with the Enhance Button feature.
Often coupled with Facial Recognition Software and Magical Database.
Examples
Anime
- 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.
Film
- The climax of the 1987 film No Way Out hinges partly on the excruciatingly-slow "enhancement" of a tiny, blurry Polaroid picture — continuously displayed with a Viewer Friendly Interface so the moviegoer can see just how close it is to implicating Kevin Costner as a Soviet mole.
- Parodied in Mel Brooks's High Anxiety. As the main character blows up the picture, he finally gets a poster sized copy, which he examines with a magnifying glass before exclaiming, "Aha!"
- Taken to a ridiculous extreme in Blade Runner, when Decker analyzes a snapshot to bring out truly magical levels of detail, including following a reflection around a corner. But then, this is a mid-21st-century snapshot, which may well be partially 3-dimensional (i.e., a hologram) and be fractally encoded.
- Parodied in Red Dwarf: Back to Earth with Kryten and Rimmer doing the same thing but cranking it Up To Eleven.
- Used to chilling effect in The Last Broadcast. Ostensibly a documentary looking into the murder of three filmmakers years after the event, the documentary maker asks a photographic expert to enhance an blurry image of a monstrous-looking creature. The image is returned to throughout the film, each time being slightly clearer, but is only revealed at the end. It turns out that the image, as well as being blurry, is also stretched vertically, and turns out to be a picture of the documentary maker, who is implied to be the original killer.
- In Enemy of the State, they take a frame from a security video, and then rotate the image in 3-D, Matrix-style, in order to see a shopping bag hidden behind someone's back. There is some handwaving about how the computer is simply "speculating", and the baddies waffle about how the bulge "could be nothing, could be everything".
- Used in the remake of The Pink Panther, to zoom in on the picture of Clouseau's airport accident, allowing the Pink Panther diamond to be seen on the bag scanner. Well, he could actually see it before he zoomed. So the theory behind it isn't wrong. The representation is though.
- There's an early example in Call Northside 777, a film from 1948, in which a reporter proves that a witness lied in a trial eleven years earlier, by blowing up an old photo of the witness and the accused together, so that a minor detail, the date on the newspaper in the hand of a paperboy in the corner of the photo, becomes clear, thus establishing that the witness saw the suspect the DAY BEFORE she made her identification, was therefore lying, and the suspect is therefore innocent.
- In Stargate the movie, technicians used several presses of the Enhance Button to discern glyphs on the other side's Stargate. Stargate SG-1, however, mostly avoided this trope... Mostly. It still crept into "Endgame". In the movie, at least, rather than using the Enhance Button to add more information that they couldn't possess, when the image is scrolled the computer displays a low-resolution placeholder until it finishes loading the high-resolution image to memory. The same process can be seen in the program Google Earth.
- Used ridiculously in Disturbia. The protagonist apparently has a good enough video camera that he can enhance a split second image seen through a hole in a grate, in a dark house, into a high resolution image.
- Played with by the Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer movie Deja Vu. A secret government agency recruits Denzel to help them apprehend a terrorist using an experimental imaging system that uses satellite data to reconstruct every aspect of the bomb site in 3D, capable of zooming in at ground level, going inside structures, even supposedly recreating audio. He is extremely skeptical at first, but then it is revealed that they are actually folding space-time in order to view past events in real time.
- Annoyingly used in the Charlies Angels movie, where they enhance the image of a normal CCTV tape taken in a normal parking garage. At night. Not only that, they spot their target through his reflection in the door of a nearby car. It simply must be seen to believed.
- Charlies Angels also has an auditory example — microphones embedded in the back of the jaw (behind the widom teeth) that somehow pick up the chaotic rush of air circulating in your mouth, clean up the white noise, and extrapolate the words that will come out of the speaker's mouth using that air. It works about as well as a real microphone. Exactly how difficult it would be to get a piece of software (inside the microphone, I believe) to attempt something approximating this is beyond words. You have to wonder if the creators mentally considered technology to be synonymous with magic when writing that script.
- "Bringing Down the House": In it, Steve Martin joins a dating service, and Queen Latifah is his first date, Martin complains that she wasn't in the picture he received. Latifah takes him to a computer, and enhances the picture, to show her in handcuffs in the background. The troper turned to a coworker and said, "That's not even possible by computers. All she would've blown up was a mass of pixels." Coworker agreed.
- Parodied in the movie Super Troopers, in a scene where Officer Ramathorn, sitting at a computer, repeatedly says "Enhance!" between random keystrokes (as a shennanigan, not because he's stupid) before his exasperated superior tells him to "just print the goddamn thing!"
- Used by Rolly in F/X 2 to get an image of the killer. It takes several zooms, and each takes more time than the last, but he eventually gets a slightly over-saturated and blurry, but still altogether too-clear picture.
- Played with in Honey, I Blew Up the Kid. Two lab technicians muse over a very blurred photo of Adam and his stuffed bunny, thinking it's an alien. When Dr. Hendrickson arrives, he presses one button which completely unblurs the photo.
- Played painfully straight in Underworld, where the protagonist has a picture of someone which has about four pixels for their entire face, but at the press of a button it becomes a clear image of her Designated Love Interest.
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.
- 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.
- 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 use the C Cube to enhance low quality video into much more higher one. Handwaved by that it's fairy technology.
- Removing the distortions and graininess from VHS tape, by interpolating the video, can be done using human technology right now. They do similar things, although not from VHS, when transferring old TV shows to DVD.
- 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. Mildly averted 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, the U.S. Airforce takes a perfectly good picture of a dragon, and "enhance" it until it looks like what they figure is some new top-secret Soviet stealth airplane.
- 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.
Live Action TV
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.
Western Animation
- Parodied in 24 Minutes, The Simpsons' spoof of 24; Principal Skinner orders Lisa to enhance a photo of a message carved into a classroom desk. When it turns out to be a slur directed at him, he shouts "De-hance! De-hance!"
- Parodied in Clone High, where Abe Lincoln watches a videotape and, upon seeing something of interest, rewinds it and tells the VCR to zoom and enhance the image. Needless to say... it does.
- Justified in an episode of Lilo And Stitch, where the camera in question was invented by a Mad Scientist and was said to take pictures at insanely high numbers of pixels.
- In Squidbillies, Early, on trial for attacking baseball players during a game, tells the court to "Zoom in! Enhance!" the evidence footage. The lawyer responds, "We can't do that. That's really more of a sci-fi thing."
- Parodied on an episode of Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law. While looking through security footage, Phil modifies the image: "Hello, and who do we have here? Enhance! Contrast! Tint! Bright! Sleep mode! Vertical hold!"
- Parodied in the Space Ghost Coast To Coast episode "King Dead
": Space Ghost tells Moltar's console to "zoom in and enhance" a frame from a ransom video. The computer zooms way in until a single yellow pixel fills the entire screen as a calm computer voice says "Enhancing. Enhancing complete. Yellow... block." From this giant pixel Space Ghost somehow recognizes the interior of his own apartment.
- In an episode of Duck Tales, the nephews are able to clearly identify a culprit on a surveillance tape by holding a magnifying glass up to their TV screen.
- Batman The Animated Series uses this like crazy. An example: Batman is trying to identify who robbed the safe at a Boxing match. He asks his Magical Computer to play security footage in super slow motion. Then he zooms in on a thug's tattoo (briefly seen during the slow mo sequence) and enhances it so well it matches up with the Facial Recognition Software and identifies the thief.
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 pixelated license plates, though it doesn't do any good if the license plate in question is completely blown out.
- This is just extrapolation (guesswork) and would never hold up in court.
- 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 trafic stop. Cameras usually record an image wider than it what is displayed on a full screen TV. Analysts were able to get what the patrol car's camera filmed beyond the edge of the normal display area (essentially 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.
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