Pull out more detail from your CCTV images!

[Birdman Adam 0]

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).

[rory 0]

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

[ShawnOklahoma 0]

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.