Software To Zoom In And Get The License Plate Number?

[DashCamOnBoard]

I'm using Registration Viewer and it's a nice program, but when you try to zoom in it's hard to see the license plate number. It ends up looking pixelated. Are there any software programs like in the movies that can zoom in, clarify or decipher/guess the license plate numbers?

Thanks?

 

[niko]

If RV can not do it, then no other free program can. There is a limitations what pixels can provide for Viewer Program. In some cases you can use VLC player "filter" option to play around with some colours and get a little improvement.

 

[Sabe]

You cannot zoom and clarify if there is no information, meaning you can go only so far.
But like Niko says, in VLC player under tools section you can do a lot even with good old trial and error system.

 

[Dashmellow]

One trick I've come up with that can sometimes make the difference between being able to read a license plate number or not is to hold an actual magnifying glass up to the computer screen when viewing an image. This can be enhanced by adjusting the contrast, gamma and other adjustment tools in VLC or similarly capable software while you are doing this.

 

[DashCamOnBoard]

I've actually been using a magnifier and you're right! It does help. The magnifier doesn't pixelate things. I've also tried exporting still .jpg images from the video. Now I'm going to try out this "VLC" thing and see how it goes.

Given the high-definition technology and good image quality of this dashcam, it's a bit disappointing that it's still pretty hard to get a tag number. Unless the car is within 10-15 feet and preferably in your same lane right in front of you, I'm finding it hard to get a good clear read on those plate numbers.

Any other ideas are welcomed! Thanks!

 

[Dashmellow]

Given the high-definition technology and good image quality of this dashcam, it's a bit disappointing that it's still pretty hard to get a tag number. Unless the car is within 10-15 feet and preferably in your same lane right in front of you, I'm finding it hard to get a good clear read on those plate numbers.

We hear that complaint a lot around here and I too wish for better results. We need to accept the limits of the current technology even though it's come quite a long way in the last few years. Basically, even a high quality two hundred or three hundred dollar dash cam has only a 1/2 or 1/3 inch sensor, a small M12 lens with a fixed aperture, and limited processing power, so there is only so much resolution, fine detail or depth of field to work with.

If I just casually shoot a full resolution image of cars in traffic using my 2500 dollar Nikon SLR camera with a 1200 dollar ED glass lens on it with its big sensor and multi-hundred dollar processor I can pull complete, detailed, readable license numbers of moving vehicles from just about anywhere in the image with ease. In fact, I have literally done that for a legal matter I was involved in where I cropped a tiny license plate out of an image and blew it up thousands of times until it was readable without having a pixelation problem. If we want something close to that level of license plate detail, even with a cheaper camera we would need much bigger dash cams with bigger sensors and bigger lenses.

 

[DashCamOnBoard]

VLC has a nice menu adjustment that lets you touch up the video brightness, contrast, and other stuff. Does anyone know if there's a way to permanently save a video with the new settings after you've tweaked it?

 

[Dashmellow]

VLC has a nice menu adjustment that lets you touch up the video brightness, contrast, and other stuff. Does anyone know if there's a way to permanently save a video with the new settings after you've tweaked it?

It would be nice but unfortunately no. One of these days (hopefully), VideoLan, the creator of VLC Media Player plans to release a cross-platform non-linear editing program based on VLC called VLMC - (VideoLAN Movie Creator) that will let you save all your adjustment tweaks and a whole lot more.

 

[niko]

VLC has a nice menu adjustment that lets you touch up the video brightness, contrast, and other stuff. Does anyone know if there's a way to permanently save a video with the new settings after you've tweaked it?

AVS Video Editor has similar to VLC filters and you can save video after "touch up".

 

[erkme73]

Maybe you can read the plates off of the reflection in your sunglasses - just aim the camera inward. I wonder what software these guys are using:

/sarc, just in case someone thought I was serious.

 

[Dashmellow]

That's great! Some say that the CIA and NSA actually have software that can do that but the algorithms and hardware they do it with are highly classified.
As far as I know, the whole meme of zooming into a tiny reflection in an image started all the way back in 1982 with the computer detail enhance scene from Blade Runner.

 

[niko]

That's great! Some say that the CIA and NSA actually have software that can do that but the algorithms and hardware they do it with are highly classified.
As far as I know, the whole meme of zooming into a tiny reflection in an image started all the way back in 1982 with the computer detail enhance scene from Blade Runner.

That "computer details enchance software" he is holding in his hand and it' called a "Jack Daniels" [emoji4]

 

[Dashmellow]

That "computer details enchance software" he is holding in his hand and it' called a "Jack Daniels" [emoji4]

That's very interesting that you noticed that @niko but it's actually not Jack Daniels! It's a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label that Deckard pours a drink from. There are also two more identical Johnnie Walker Black bottles sitting on the table to the right of the computer. Then about a minute and a half later the computer zooms in on yet another identical bottle of Johnnie Walker Black on the dresser in the photograph he's enhancing. Apparently, this was an early example of movie product placement and that same whiskey bottle appears in several other scenes in the film as well.

 

[niko]

That's very interesting that you noticed that @niko but it's actually not Jack Daniels! It's a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label that Deckard pours a drink from. About a minute and a half later the computer zooms in on an identical bottle of Johnnie Walker Black on the dresser in the photograph he's enhancing. Apparently, this was an early example of movie product placement and that same whiskey bottle appears in several other scenes in the film.


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You are right, Mr. "Sherlock Holmes"
On mobile phone for me it is hard to see what exact drink is in square bottle.
I must admit that I can not make difference between 20$ "Walker / Daniels" and 10K "Macallan". To me all drinks with 40° taste the same. Yeah, I am not big whiskey-brandy-vodka etc. enthusiast, I prefer beer

 

[Dashmellow]

You are right, Mr. "Sherlock Holmes"
On mobile phone for me it is hard to see what exact drink is in square bottle.
I must admit that I can not make difference between 20$ "Walker / Daniels" and 10K "Macallan". To me all drinks with 40° taste the same. Yeah, I am not big whiskey-brandy-vodka etc. enthusiast, I prefer beer

It really was "detective" work and it kind of blows my mind because if it weren't for you mentioning the Jack Daniels I wouldn't have noticed the similar looking whiskey bottle that the computer zooms in on and seen that the iconic Johnnie Walker label was the same. That got me to do a search for "Blade Runner whiskey bottle" and I discovered a whole world of Blade Runner movie prop collectibles I never knew about before and learned of the product placement in the film. There's even a whole "thing" surrounding the unique Old Fashioned glass Deckard drinks the whiskey from. Up until then I was only aware of the holy grail collectible insanity about reproductions of the famous pistol Harrison Ford uses in the movie.

I prefer beer too! I live in the US state with the most number of small breweries per capita in the country and so we have some great craft breweries and pubs right nearby!

 

[reverend]

I love some of the craft beers coming out of the US but they sure don't love me!

 

[efoo]

Macgyver already into this CSI image enhancer even before CSI

 

[jokiin]

CSI upped the ante though

 

[mollydog]

doesn’t get better than watching classic TV shows, “magic fingers do your stuff” as he turns a knob

a bit light going to the light switch on the wall and saying “magic fingers do your stuff” and miraculously the lights come on

my thinking is that the CIA or NASA or the FBI might have character recognition software, that might give a good interpretation of some out of focus or pixilated text, but as far as extracting more information than is there in the first place is going to be some light years away from here,

here’s an old calculator screen, no mater how far you go to enhance the numbers, you aren’t going to find any further information in the LED’s as number is only made up of 7 LED (max), and zooming in X200 isn’t going to find an 8th if it’s not there in the first place

or maybe a better example

you can’t find more bricks in the image if they aren’t there in the first place, in years to come, when they get to make these sensors as fine grained as transparency film was (or better) then yes they can zoom in to the microscopic level and might find detail,

 

[Nigel]

...you can’t find more bricks in the image if they aren’t there in the first place, in years to come, when they get to make these sensors as fine grained as transparency film was (or better) then yes they can zoom in to the microscopic level and might find detail,

Except that in dashcam video there are more pixels than the number of pixels in the image.

Since the image of the plate is likely to be moving within the video, if you take a frame and then the next frame has moved diagonally by half a pixel in both x and y directions then you have a second set of pixels that lie in between the first set, you then have twice the original resolution and with 30 fps there is certainly opportunity to extract a significantly enhanced image. A bit like the BBC Skywatch Orion challenge this year where they used thousands of photos from viewers mobile phones etc to produce an image of the Orion nebula which was described as "almost Hubble like" and certainly a vast improvement on any single mobile phone image.