Home videos capture treasured moments — but also many a grainy image and shaky scene, as any visit to YouTube shows.
Now people who shoot impromptu videos on their cellphones and other handheld devices may find some help in stabilizing the rough spots — or in bringing their new baby’s face into focus — before posting their clips online. And it comes from specialized algorithms more common in a forensics lab than on Facebook.
MotionDSP Inc, a software maker in San Mateo, California, is offering a US$50 download for PCs that tackles pixelated and fuzzy frames in standard definition video. It analyzes the color and position of pixels in frames adjacent to ones with the poor images, said Sean Varah, the company’s chief executive, then adds information found in those nearby frames to make improvements. The enhanced videos can then be saved or uploaded to YouTube or other sites.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The consumer program is adapted from the company’s more powerful product, Ikena (about US$7,700), which is used by law enforcement authorities to recover details like license plate numbers in low-quality video, he said.
The image-enhancement algorithms are part of a research field called super-resolution, said Sanjay Patel, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Super-resolution is a class of techniques one can use on ordinary video to make it look better,” he said.
Those include the computationally intensive process of seeking extra, compensatory information in nearby frames
“There’s a lot of interest in the technology in research labs at universities and in specialized professional software for video processing,” he said — for instance, in crime labs. “But you don’t see much of it in consumer products.”
MotionDSP’s software, called vReveal, can do some editing — trimming clips or rotating sideways video, for example — but its main function is narrower: to improve appearance by increasing resolution and smoothing out the effects of a bobbing camera.
The software’s job is to fix shaky, noisy home video, said Nikola Bozinovic, vice president of engineering at MotionDSP.
“It’s pretty much for any standard-definition video you’ve recorded, including anything transferred from VHS,” Bozinovic said.
Jon Peddie, who heads Jon Peddie Research, a consulting firm in Tiburon, California, said specialized software like vReveal may be popular with consumers as more of them create and post videos.
“If two of us are at the same soccer game, each photographing it with a cheap camera, but I do some enhancing afterward,” that video will look better and get more views, Peddie said.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique