[CM30]

This reminds me of how a lot of older TV shows and movies had an 'enhance' button that could somehow magically take a tiny, blurred image and blow it up to a level of detail where even the most minor things could be seen again. Like a suspect's eyes in the reflection of a window that looked like it was maybe 4 pixels in size in the original image.

The AI examples and reasoning in the article are exactly why this can't work, and is so unrealistic. The info isn't just hidden away in the info in a way some tool can figure out what it is with another effort, it's simply not present entirely. Any tool that tries to enhance a low quality image or video is just going to be making up the missing data.

[milesvp]

> is just going to be making up the missing data.

This is generally true. What I find fascinating is the application of information that is not present in the data but that can be confirmed by the data. I’m thinking specifically of deblurring algorithms people use to recover text. If you can guess what font is being used in a screengrab with, say, someone’s bank account blurred out, you can take the i formation contained in the downloaded font and try combinations until you match the blur algorithm that may also be information not contained in the image.

What’s also crazy, is that even if all you do is black out the text, kerning alone can still be used to guess the correct text with some degree of accuracy. I worked on redaction software at one point, and these were very much the types of things we thought about when dealing with text.

[NL807]

>What I find fascinating is the application of information that is not present in the data but that can be confirmed by the data. I’m thinking specifically of deblurring algorithms people use to recover text.

I would argue that high frequency information is not missing in a blurred image, rather it's spread out spatially. Every sample in the blurred image is a convolution of multiple samples (i.e. high frequency data) from the originating source. Theoretically, it should be invertible, provided the exact function is known that does the convolution, but there are practical limitations, such as knowing how to apply the inverse operations at the edges and dealing with the extreme sensitivity to errors.

[vitally3643]

It's a visual hash. It isn't reversible, but it is uniquely confirmable.

[altruios]

> Any tool that tries to enhance a low quality image or video is just going to be making up the missing data.

So there is some things that instinctively don't sound correct here.

A frame may not contain the info to enhance, maybe it's too blurry... but a series of frames can (I'm pretty sure) between them have enough info to deblur an object in the background, it really helps to know the focal length, and distance maps...

My only point is information in a video is more than the sum of the information of it's frames, it also captures delta, not just from frame to frame, but relevant frame to relevant frame. That's a fair bit to work off of.

I do agree with our general point when information is 'absent'. I disagree how much absent information is in a video which can't be reconstructed by this delta. It certainly isn't zero, or 100%.

Inventing colors from a grayscale is a good example of absent information and of where this goes awry. Deblurring/blurring operations, less so.

[wizzwizz4]

> but a series of frames can (I'm pretty sure) between them have enough info to deblur an object in the background

You're probably thinking of geometrical super-resolution, such as gigapixel photography. Blurring is the discarding of high-frequency information, and only a very very small part of this information can be recovered using techniques like this (as in, so little that you wouldn't be able to notice it).

> My only point is information in a video is more than the sum of the information of it's frames,

It's actually less than the sum of the information of it's frames. An off-the-shelf lossless compression algorithm can give you an upper bound for the amount of information present in a video file.

[JamesTRexx]

coughRedDwarfcough

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIHNiR3CP8

[TacticalCoder]

> This reminds me of how a lot of older TV shows and movies had an 'enhance' button that could somehow magically take a tiny, blurred image and blow it up to a level of detail where even the most minor things could be seen again.

Mandatory BladeRunner scene:

https://youtu.be/8-Rw-XAsBhM

[m463]

or samsung and it's "space zoom" AI feature that helps you take pictures of the moon:

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-fake-space-zoom-moo...

now that astronauts can take their phones into space, wonder what a shot of the earth would look like on a "space zoom" phone?

[bob1029]

https://youtu.be/FVOydVwOO4M