There’s a running joke in pretty much any high tech detective show these days where the analyst can take a blurry image and do a series of enlarges and enhances until… the murderer is revealed! If that doesn’t ring any bells for you, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you need to watch more TV. Here’s a parody to give you the general idea, in any event.
It’s gotten to the point where I wanted to start a new company just so I could call it Enhance Sector Four. I don’t know what it would have done, but the business cards would have some blurry stuff on it. Maybe lenticular business cards – money’s no object if you have no potential clients!
Here’s the thing though: someone actually figured out how to do it.
There is math involved, which is probably why it took as long as it did, but the potential ramifications are huge. At the moment the big win seems to be in medical imaging, where shots can be taken much faster and the missing data reconstituted algorithmically, but the compression possibilities for images and video (why store things you can derive later?) could be game changers.
Plus, enhance sector four!
I imagine most of that stuff is still a while away, but in the meantime if you want to live the dream, I found this page incredibly fulfilling – hack the URL to put your own images in (via neatorama)
