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Comment by jbattle | Hacker News Reader

I expect big things in the coming decades coming out of computer vision & image processing. I wouldn't be surprised if algorithms to 'zoom & enhance' images reach the levels we laugh about in movies today.

I'm not well read on the topic so I might be talking out of my ear, but this is the sort of thing I'm anticipating getting more and more powerful over time: http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~milanfar/talks/milanfar.pdf (jump to page 23 if you want to see demos of the algorithm)

http://www.scriptol.com/programming/graphic-algorithms.php

edit: grammar

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Noise and lack of resolution are different beasts. That paper has nothing to do with "zoom & enhance", which will never reach the level we see in movies, since the information is just not there.

Yet both noise-reduction and resolution-enhancement are both fundamentally about taking whatever information you do have and using that to interpolate/infer information that has been lost (or was never captured).

Especially in certain domains such as written letters (e.g. license plates) or faces that have a well-known structure with variations in known dimensions, I wouldn't be surprised to see algorithms that can probabilistically infer what information would have originally been there. Of course you'd never reconstruct an entire face from a single pixel, but how far can we go? I dunno - but my hunch is pretty far

And of course if we look at recent history we see where that technique goes terribly wrong (Xerox document archival compression).

That's not entirely true. Images are highly redundant and have a lot of structure to them. it might be possible to reconstruct the image a decent amount from that. Obviously a lot of the information and all small details would be missing, but you could make it more recognizable.

> I wouldn't be surprised if algorithms to 'zoom & enhance' images don't reach the levels we laugh about in movies today.

wouldn't or would ? don't or do ?

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