Video tool to zoom in on criminals

Washington, July 1 (Inditop.com) You must have seen how cops in TV programmes zoom in on a security camera video to read a number plate or capture the face of a hold-up artist.

But in real life, enhancing this low-quality video to focus in on important clues hasn’t been an easy task. Until now.

Leonid Yaroslavsky of Tel Aviv University (TAU) and colleagues have developed a new video “perfection tool” to help investigators enhance raw video images and identify suspects.

Commissioned by a defence-related company to improve what the naked eye cannot see, the tool can be used with live video or with recordings, in colour or black-and-white.

“This enhancement of resolution can be a critical factor in locating terrorists or identifying criminal suspects,” said Yaroslavsky, a professor.

The new invention enhances the resolution of raw video images from security cameras, military binoculars, and standard personal-use video cameras, improving the quality in which the images were originally recorded or transmitted.

This can mean the difference between seeing trees blowing in the wind and finding a terrorist hiding in those trees.

A major challenge in video analysis is that images of objects become distorted over long distances due to variations in the air that can affect our sight and the “sight” of a camera.

Using specially designed algorithms, the team built a software application that lets cameras and video analysis equipment stabilise images, allowing objects that are really moving to be distinguished from chaotic atmospheric changes.

The technology will increase the odds of identifying suspects in court, said Yaroslavsky, but its other applications are equally significant, said a TAU release.

Instead of sending large video files over the Internet, smaller and lower-resolution files could be sent, which can be enhanced at their destination points. This could save bandwidth and time.

His findings were published in Optical Letters and the Journal of Real Time Image Processing.