I'm among the legions who fume when the investigator on the TV show zooms in endlessly on a photo to uncover some minute detail that in reality couldn't have been photographed by any camera. Worst is when the investigator clicks some "increase resolution" button to smooth a bunch of blocky pixels into a richly detailed image.
This low-resolution image shows the greater detail that can be shown in the license plate by combining data from several frames of a video. The lower view of the plate is enhanced.
(Credit: MotionDSP)Although that Hollywood hokum is an information-theory impossibility with a single image, some limits are lifted when you have multiple shots of the same scene. And a start-up called MotionDSP is working on commercializing that technology to improve photo and video quality.
The image above demonstrates the technology in action. Clicking the arrow buttons will load different images; my favorite is the mariachi band in the gazebo, in which the process reveals arches and architectural details otherwise lost in noisy murk.
The technology also can get rid of chunky compression artifacts, smooth jagged lines, enrich colors, reveal details, and make text readable. It's an example of computational photography--or videography in this case--in which sophisticated computer processing can improve a photo or video after it was taken.
MotionDSP has been funded by In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's venture investment arm, which naturally is interested in software to extract information from grainy or low-resolution images. But the San Mateo, Calif.-based company is raising a new round of funding to underwrite a more consumer-oriented application of its software, said Chief Executive and founder Sean Varah.
The company showed off its FixMyMovie.com technology for improving lower-grade video at the Demo conference last fall, but the company has other applications of the technology in mind, Varah said.
Most recently, the company added the ability to create a single high-resolution 1280x1024 JPEG image from a 320x240 video. The company also is contemplating use of the technology to stitch together smaller frames into a wide panorama, to improve image tones to retrieve detail in bright highlights and murky shadows. And it's possible, if there's demand, that the company could pursue resolution-enhancing technology to let photography enthusiasts improve their images, Varah said.
Improve your photos?
MotionDSP's technology works by comparing as many as 25 views of the same subject matter. The FixMyMovie site uses the consecutive frames of a video, but the technology also works on a collection of still images.
A burst of five or six images--"it's better if your camera moves a bit"--can be combined into a single still image with four times the resolution, Varah said.
"If you have good 10-megapixel image, do you need to make something bigger? It might make sense if you want to crop or make a billboard," he said.
I suspect there's a significant population that might be interested; some purchase tools like OnOne Software's Genuine Fractals to increase the pixel count of their photos for large-printing purposes. The MotionDSP method might not be a simple process, though, for example in a case with moving subjects.
For videos, FixMyMovie can make several improvements. A video shot with a cell phone at 7.5 frames per second, for example, can be increased to 15 frames per second.
Right now, the Web site is free, but eventually MotionDSP will move it to a "freemium" model in which customers would pay for improvements to longer or higher-resolution videos, Varah said.
Better video from set-top boxes?
MotionDSP also is exploring licensing deals that could enable companies to embed the technology in devices such as set-top boxes. "Everyone wants to take Internet video to the television," but today's low-resolution YouTube videos aren't inspiring on a large screen, he said.
Right now the software takes a little time to improve videos, but with multicore machines growing more common, on-the-fly processing will arrive soon. "I think real-time is less than a year away," Varah said.
The company also is seeking new investors. "We're out raising a round now to take FixMyMovie and really expand on it," Varah said.
One area of interest is building an online service that can be embedded elsewhere--Facebook, for example. Another is improvements to the FixMyMovie site that would let users automatically push videos to one's YouTube account or a blog.
MotionDSP got started about three years ago with technology from the University of California-Santa Cruz. The company now has 18 employees, with much engineering work done in Serbia.
Update: I clarified the caption of the illustration to better indicate what editing had gone on to produce the side-by-side images.
Microsoft has taken the beta tag off a plug-in to let Photoshop read and write files in the HD Photo format, which Microsoft is standardizing as JPEG XR.
The free plug-in is available for download for Windows and Mac OS X systems. The plug-ins work on Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, and Photoshop CS2 or CS3, Bill Crow, who's overseen the HD Photo and JPEG XR effort, wrote on his blog Thursday.
These two images both are edited versions of overexposed originals. After editing, the overexposed JPEG version on the left looks murky. The right picture, originally encoded and then edited as an HD Photo, has more dynamic range, so detail in the highlights can be recovered better. It's shown here converted back into regular JPEG after the editing process.
(Credit: Microsoft/Bill Crow)Microsoft hopes HD Photo eventually will replace the ubiquitous JPEG standard overseen by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Among the HD Photo advantages that Microsoft touts: it offers more efficient compression, richer color and a much wider dynamic range; it can optionally store images without data loss from compression; it's free of royalty and licensing constraints; and it can run in camera hardware. Support for the file format, initially called Windows Media Photo, is built into Windows Vista.
HD Photo also can be used to show images online at different resolutions, transmitting only the portion of the image that's shown on the screen. That's useful for zooming in to a high-resolution photo without having to download a vast image, a technology Microsoft uses in its HD View software for viewing detailed images online. One organization using HD View is Xrez.
However, Microsoft faces significant challenges in encouraging adoption of the technology. Building it into Vista is a big step, and an endorsement from Photoshop publisher Adobe Systems helps, but JPEG is deeply entrenched. Standardization through JPEG could encourage industry players to adopt the standard--in particular those who are leery of Microsoft's power.
But there are plenty of standards that never catch on. What could really tip the balance in favor of HD Photo/JPEG XR is if it gets built into cameras directly so photographers can start using it from the outset.
The final version of the plug-in, developed in part by Pegasus Imaging Systems, looks mostly like recent betas, Crow said.
"All the changes we've made since the last beta are under the covers, fixing a couple minor bugs, addressing several theoretical security vulnerabilities and generally bringing the code up to current Microsoft standards for released software," he said. "Don't forget that the beta versions will expire on December 31st, so you should definitely download and install these new released versions."
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