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.
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.
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