Can you get clearer view of a photo of a grainy license plate?

Arts & Media Visual Arts & Design
21

By any chance have you look around your neighborhood to see if there are more cameras around? maybe someone else captured the license plate.

22

@eddie200112 Do you have any more images or even video footage of the event?

23

I have the video I could send and a few snapshots. I did have several sequential frames but deleted them and the archive has since recycled the space on my server so I cant get them again.

24

If this is from a video feed (which I'm assuming it is) you can take multiple frames with the car in it, adjust them to overlap in the area with the license plate, and then use the "layer average" function in adobe CC (or G'MIC if you want to do it on the cheap) to resolve more detail than each individual frame can offer.

here's a video tutorial:

in gimp theis can be applied with:

"auto_align_layer" from Hugin to align your pictures without manual intervention. Then the G'MIC plugin to make the "average" operation. Note that the "median" operation is also very clean. With the "median" operation, maybe noise reduction is a bit lower, but you probably won't have ghosts in the result.ï»ż

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25

I was going to try a variation of this on the image. I used to do it at work when people brought in photos of their beloved deceased to be printed and it was of low quality.

26

well, teach a man to fish and all

27

Sorry that's a whole different debate. I'm just here to try and help. Cheers.

28

That's a good approach, in theory, but what do you do when the person doesn't want to learn?

29

make them pay for the fish, duh.

1 Like
30

Google had a stab at the "CSI enhance" thing and got surprising results: http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/7/14532206/google-brain-research-neural-networks-zoom-and-enhance-pixelated-images

31

It's a cool idea, but to use it here, you'd have to train a convnet on cars and license plates for hundreds of hours. still a long way off from being useful

32

It could have worked
 you just needed a little more image detail. The plate is too muddy. You’re not re-compressing the still images when you export the frames, are you?

I usually pull stills as something like .TIF to maximized retention of quality and detail.

Good luck, and sorry about your loss.

33

10 month necro. Thread is locked.