Birdman Adam 0 Posted July 22, 2011 Many people come to the forum looking for help in bringing out details in their images - usually after something bad has happened. One of the most common is trying to re-focus, sharpen, or deinterlacing a license-plate image. Unfortunately, this is not "CSI". There is no magic! BUT, there are things we can do to bring out a bit more detail - possibly enough to get you something that will help in an investigation. Here is a crappy license plate picture, with a lot of motion blur: That image is about 50px wide, by 23px tall. Can you read it? No. Now download Gimp (free), crop the image to the details you want, and deinterlace the image - choosing the best fields: After deinterlacing: Already much better! That interlacing is common in crappy systems... Now I will show you some free software I found, called Focus magic. There is not much more to be done, but this helps some. Choose the Focus filter. Click on the image to do a preview. It wants you to pay to do the whole image, but we don't need to do that - just a segment! It will suggest the best blur width and amount of focusing to be done. Play with both, although the defaults it chooses are usually best. The final image: Comparison: There are other things that can be done (Rory I know you had some examples?). As you can see, its not like in CSI! But even with this horrible pixel size that was captured, I now have at least a partial plate - probably 11244, with north carolina's "mountain environmental support plate" (green with the bear). Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
rory 0 Posted July 22, 2011 equalize brightness, sharpen more enlarge, sharpen, negative image ... equalize brightness, sharpen more, enlarge, equalize, sharpen more ... etc negative image helps in some cases but not in this one Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ShawnOklahoma 0 Posted September 1, 2017 Hi all, so i have a problem. I posted previously for an awful Netrome Blackbox system. Today I have a different issue. I have three avi videos (approx 4min) that show a car causing damage to my property. I am quite the novice with security camera images and am unable to pull the plate number from the video. Would anyone be willing to help me please? I can email the videos. I tried many suggestions and even the video tweaks in VLC but no luck. If anyone is willing to try, please email me at shawndave1@gmail.com. I appreciate any help anyone can offer. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites