One of the frustrations of watching various sorts of crime shows is the abuse of computer imaging technology. I always cringe badly at those scenes where they zoom in on one pixel of a computer video and run some refining code on it and it looks like a perfectly clear shot. Suddenly, from the little blob scene from 1000 yards away, you can make out the man’s face, the writing on his t-shirt, the brand of ballpoint pen making a dent in his front pocket…
Sorry, but tech doesn’t work that way. If you have one pixel of data, it isn’t hiding all that much. There are indeed things that you can do to enhance images and make details more noticable, but they have very real limits.
Today, I saw this bit of video… an example of something rather impressive that they can now do with a single still photo image. It’s not something that’s actually in police hands at the moment apparently, and I suspect it requires more than a casual amount of computer power… but we’re bound to see it on some show in the near future (complete with abuse as the camera goes through a door, up a staircase, and sees the victim’s body on the floor when it isn’t actually in the photo.)
