Hacker News Reader

Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

I remenber movies from the past where a police Investigation team magically upscaled a blurred picture of a numberplate, person etc. Always smiled and thought this is such bullshit. But it might actually become reality. Number plates still hard though

View on HN

There are a lot of amazing things you can do when you have extra constraints for the blurred information, like which font was used for a blurred text or knowing that it was a valid barcode that got blurred. In general "enhancing" images just does not work though. It will fake it in a way that looks believable to us but it cannot recover information that is not even there.

But sometimes there is enough information, just in a format that isn’t easily useable. For example a low-res video of a car driving away: each frane is too blurry to recover the plate number, but all frames together have enough information.

I would expect DL models to perform wel on this task, but I could not find many results.

You are correct, of course. In that case, the information is actually there albeit spread out temporally over several frames. I should have said that I was talking about single photographs.

Do you know about that technology that works like a "spying microphone", reconstructing the environmental sound in a (ordinary quality, ordinary rate) video through the minuscule vibrations in the objects computed from the frames?

Found: https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vib...

> ... they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass

I see that (as expected) it has been discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131785

> magically upscaled a blurred picture

...To realistically get an hallucinated reality.

But member occamrazor, nearby, is right: to induce non-evident facts from a number of different downscaled pieces of information is possible.

Edit: if the idea of enlarging to reconstruct real missing detail (Mhh... no.) excites you, this (recovered for the above mentioned branch), real tech, will blow your mind: https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vib...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com