The video shows his face, but it's not as clear as I would like. I don't know how to quantify its quality except to say its "not bad" but "not great either."
I would welcome any suggestions for extracting and improving still images from the two clips. I'd prefer to outsource this to someone that has experience in this kind of work.
I don't have a lot of confidence that the local police are going to invest a lot of time and effort in this, only because they are overloaded.
Any recommendations for providers or other actions to take would be appreciated.
If you want to contact me privately I can take a look at them and maybe offer some specific suggestions.
I would welcome any suggestions you might have. If you'll contact me at john.sambrook@protonmail.com I'll send you the two clips. I don't see how to find your email and I'm reluctant to ask you to disclose it publicly.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I pretty much assume that any email address is "compromised" (as in no longer spam free not pwnd) as soon as it is created. It may not be that bad, but I honestly believe the first time the email address is used as an ID then it is.
It's not binary, as in, either "compromised" or not. There are lots of different spammers using different methods. Posting your email address on a public website will dramatically increase the amount of spam you get.
If you put an address on an "About Us" page or something you might get some business related spam now that WHOIS data mining is dead, but regular 'ol users you want to target haven't posted their email addresses in HTML for 10+ years now.
Here's a "practical" way to do it:
https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0727694641/here-s-how-to-p...
And here's an example of a research paper about it:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.04590.pdf
The local police will spend no time and effort on it. And any video you produce/enhance will not be able to be used as evidence by them.
The problem is that I'm sure the subject moves considerably from one image to the next. You will have to isolate his face in each frame and transform the face grabs so that they line up perfectly before the images can be combined by averaging.
It's worth a shot!
Detect faces in each video frame, skew/stretch so that the area of each detection is the same, apply this super resolution technique in OpenCV.
I don't know much about this topic, but it seems reasonable to think that multiple frames ought to be useful in estimating subpixel values.
I agree with your take on the suggestion that that police won't spend time on it, and that any altered images wouldn't be admissible as evidence. They did spend considerable time taking fingerprints in my home. And even the original video is damning. I am hopeful that better quality images can be used to get the name and possible location of the suspect. I'm offering a reward of $1,000 to the first person that gives Kirkland PD information that leads to them interviewing a credible suspect.
I doubt that any of our property will be recovered. I'd like to see this individual off the streets. Perhaps someday, he will get treatment that would help him.
It may not be good evidence in itself, but if the person is recognized, they could be investigated and more evidence found. It's not unlikely they'd be in possession stolen property, that their clothes match the video, that they left cell phone records in the vicinity and so on.
Thank you for taking the time to help me with this.
a) using many frames to ID the perp
and perhaps
b) working at a native H.264 I/P frame level with the neural networks, rather than at a decoded framebuffer level.
https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/machine-learning/
You could grab individual frames of the video and run them through this and see what the results look like?
(no connection to Pixelmator - just played with the software and it looked pretty darn cool)
It is making up new image details (highly convincing and realistic new image details) and hence this tech is completely inappropriate for handling criminal evidence.
Maybe your person has a darker pixel on the one side of their face you see: might be a mole, a face tattoo, or a five-o'clock shadow, or maybe they've just got a bit of mud on their face from falling in the dark. DNN will 'helpfully' provide that large facial moles and tattoos are less common than facial hair in their database, and most of their models wipe mud off their face before having their picture taken, so it will give your suspect a bit of realistic salt-and-pepper growth. Or maybe it has a bunch of interesting pictures of a guy with some facial hair and face tattoos that it can fit to the video. Suddenly you find you've been burglarized by Post Malone.
It's only useful if you're trying to get an idea of what an average situation looks like because you can't imagine what you're seeing in the noise.
For example, check out https://www.astronomie.be/registax/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.08176.pdf
I'm sure github has some repos on this
For faces: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2017/06/04/enhance-upscaling-im...
Before investing real money on this, be aware of the legal value of these videos: do we really see the burglar forcing the front door? Taking your property? Is your neighbour entitled to film that area? The answer strongly depends on your local laws.
Can this actually be done to any degree of usefulness?
If you want to test one, for "motion blur" (let's say the licence of a car driving away), get this (last freeware version):
https://github.com/Y-Vladimir/SmartDeblur/downloads
And test it on the images here (actual test images from a reknowned Commercial vendor of a suite that is also for videos):
https://articles.forensicfocus.com/2014/10/08/can-you-get-th...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jkyxlkh0aa5d24m/IMG_5402.mp4?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxgwpe6bn39p0re/IMG_5404.mp4?dl=0
Also, now you know your camera isn’t doing the best, add other camera(s) where it would have helped. Eg to capture face-on angle as you approach door. Consider upping the resolution of the cameras you add.
On a more general note, rethink about how this guy found your place as a suitable target. Mitigate what you can. He knew he had plenty of time. And he seemed quite comfortable being there.
https://www.fast.ai/
https://youtu.be/9spwoDYwW_I?t=2913
https://github.com/alexjc/neural-enhance
And your assertion that "any software technique...won't look like the face" is incorrect. Again using multiple frames, it's entirely possible to infer what clearer underlying detail would result in the less-sharp pixel values in the video, given the training data establishing the relationship. It's a specific technique for reconstruction, not just drawing in a realistic but synthetic replacement like Photoshop's content-aware fill.
Or possibly using the Super Scale feature in Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve?
1. Identifying the person
2. The authorities finding this person
3. The arrest of this person
4. A conviction of this person
and possibly also
5. You getting your things back.
In my cynical experience, every single one of these five assumptions is extremely unlikely to actually happen. Note that each one of them depends on all the previous ones.
I see this on a lot of forums: people not answering the question but feeling that they just have to give their piece of advice that OP is having the wrong problem.
Stop it. It isn't helpful. Especially to others who look for answeers to the same question (but perhaps for entirely different reasons).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
However, it came with context, which was a mistake because it drew focus away from the actual question.
In fact I watched these two videos on Ring, since by insane coincidence this happened in a neighborhood less than 3 miles away. Someone there had already recognized seeing the person sitting outside a nearby Starbucks.
Facial recognition, image search, and the internet has come a long way. It shouldn't be long or far-fetched that local law enforcement can start leveraging these tools to pursue more of these cases. For all the fear-mongering, and true ethical issues, of facial-recognition and surveillance, this is a situation where it can actually pay dividends.
(and no they'll probably never get their stuff back, but that is what insurance is for. Hopefully it was nothing sentimental or otherwise irreplaceable and truly just "stuff")
Posting to HN about wanting to digitally enhance surveillance video indicates, at least to me, someone expecting some practical result (which is unlikely), not someone simply doing what can reasonably be done for the sake of society.
But thanks a bunch for your email address, too.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519