In The Trenches Video Series
Security Experts react to "Let's Enhance" - Digital Zoom vs Optical Zoom
In this series we'll take myths and common misconceptions in the industry and take a dive into the topic. In this first episode we're talking about the "enhance" button we see so much on TVs and movies. Does it really exist?
Our speakers today are:
- > Matthew Nederlanden
- > Benjamin Larue
- > Michael Bell
- > James Campbell
- > Gil Illescas
James Campbell:
... Every NBR, every camera system, has some form of digital zoom where you draw an area and you zoom in and what do you see? It's just a bunch of pixels and you're like, "Oh, I thought it was supposed to like all," like, "It's supposed to show that plate now that I digitally zoomed."
Speaker 2:
Hey, everyone, welcome to the first edition of the new series we're calling Security Myth Busting. We're looking at some of the biggest myths in the security industry and setting the record straight. In the first episode, we're going to be tackling the huge misconception in the industry, and that is the entire enhance that you see on the CSI and other police shows. Does that even really exist? So let me introduce you to our panel for this episode. I've got Gil and James tackling this one.
Gil Illescas:
Howdy.
Speaker 2:
Awesome. So let's start off by tackling the myth and we're going to start by watching this fantastic video here.
Speaker 3:
Now let's get a good look at you. Hold it, run that back. Wait a minute. Go right. There. Freeze that. Full screen. Okay. Freeze that. [inaudible 00:01:18] already. Vector in on that guy by the [inaudible 00:01:20]. Zoom in right here on this spot. Vector in. With the right equipment, the image could be enlarged and sharpened. What's that? It's an enhancement program. Can you clear that up any? I don't know. Let's enhance it. Enhance section A6. I enhanced the detail and I think there's enough to enhance, release it to my screen. Enhance the reflection in her eyes. Let's run this through Video enhancement.
Gil Illescas:
The reflection on the eye is the worst part of it all.
Speaker 2:
It's unbelievable.
Speaker 3:
Reflection. Someone's reflection. A reflection. There's a reflection of the man's face. Reflection. There's a reflection. Zoom in on the mirror. You can see a reflection. Can you enhance the image from here? Can you enhance him right here? Can you enhance it? Can you enhance it? Can you enhance this? Can you enhance it? Hold on a second, I'll enhance it. Zoom in on the door. Time's 10. Zoom. Move in. More. Wait, stop.
Speaker 2:
These are some of my favorite shows.
Speaker 3:
Rotate us 75 degrees around the [inaudible 00:02:10].
James Campbell:
Yeah, I know. Battle Star Galactica is awesome.
Speaker 3:
Stop. Go back to the park.
James Campbell:
Man, that one where it turns? [inaudible 00:02:18].
Speaker 3:
Maybe we can use the [inaudible 00:02:19] method to see into the windows. The software was [inaudible 00:02:22]. The right combination of algorithms. He's taken illumination algorithms to the next level and I can use them to enhance this photograph. Lock on and enlarge the Z axis. Enhance. Algorithm. Enhance, enhance, freeze, and enhance.
Gil Illescas:
Big, big term.
Speaker 2:
Wow. All right.
James Campbell:
It's funny and then it becomes cringe worthy.
Speaker 2:
Oh, exactly.
James Campbell:
It's like, yeah, it's funny. And then you're like, man, how many shows? Yeah, it's bad.
Gil Illescas:
So, you had shows and TV and movies. You had everything there.
Speaker 2:
So, James and Gill, I'll start by asking this. Is this real or fake?
Gil Illescas:
Go ahead, James.
James Campbell:
It's pretty fake. Yeah, this is just one of those myths that we've had in the industry for this specific purpose. TV shows are all about the enhanced. You can see, that was what? 15 different shows or movies and maybe more that have used that kind of cliche/trope or whatever they're called. And it doesn't really exist in the real world like that. I think we'll go deeper into it, but yeah, it's pretty fake.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah. I want to break it down because I love the immediate, can you enhance that? And then the video shot goes right to the fingers on the keyboards and they just start flying through keys.
Speaker 2:
I know. And the unlimited levels of zoom that they had? They just kept zooming in? I'm like, gosh.
Gil Illescas:
The most realistic one, I think there was a guy actually touching a plus or minus zoom button that was probably the most realistic one of all of them.
James Campbell:
Yeah. That's about the only one I saw that was like... My favorite one was the one where it just kind of turned, it goes to a 3D image and moves the camera somehow. That was ridiculous. That definitely doesn't exist.
Gil Illescas:
But it's great because, okay, so it's blurry from far away, so let's enhance it or digitally zoom in and blow it up and it gets clearer.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
How wild is that? I think you just said something though, Gil, that's really important too before we move on. Can we just quickly define what they're meaning? This type of video, the media, what they're meaning when they say enhance?
Gil Illescas:
So in my opinion, what they're trying to do is that they're just trying to clear it up, get better resolution. They're trying to get closer, clearer, better resolution is obviously clearer. And they're also, it seems to me like they're also making the picture even a better picture than the possible resolution could be. That about explain it?
James Campbell:
Using magic and machinery. That's the other thing. They always bring out some big server. It's like we're going to put this through the server.
Speaker 2:
That's what he said. Put it through the A6, enhance.
James Campbell:
Right.
Speaker 2:
That's exactly right. Gil, nail on the head, right? What they're meaning and what they're physically trying to do in the real world is digitally zoom and make sure they get the clearest resolution possible. But they're saying it in ways that, like you just said, that they would get better resolution than they originally had when they recorded the video. How's that even possible?
James Campbell:
I think even to define what digital zoom is, because this is going into this misconception and myth is that people do think that when you go, every NVR, every camera system, has some form of digital zoom where you draw an area and you zoom in and what do you see? It's just a bunch of pixels and you're like, "Oh, I thought I was supposed to like, it's supposed to show that plate now that I digitally zoomed." And so digitally zoom is just basically the same thing. If you grabbed a JPEG picture on your computer and you just hit the zoom button so many times and you start to see individual little pixels and so you're not getting any more detail out of the image, it is making the details bigger. So it's useful in scenarios where you're looking at it from your phone and your phone's six inches maybe or so and you can't see the detail or you're on a laptop screen, you have a 4K camera, digital zoom can help make those details larger on your screen, but it doesn't give you any more detail than you already had. And that's, I think, where the myth is that you can use digital zoom and you're going to get more detail out of it. That just doesn't exist.
Gil Illescas:
And digital zoom usually happens after recording. That's when people want it. So there's optical zoom, which you can do before recording, which is true zoom because you can zoom in and focus on whatever your subject is and that will in effect enhance the video for you. But it's true video, it's live. Just you can't do an optical zoom after recording, it can be only digital. And just what James explained, it doesn't do quite what these shows show you.
Speaker 2:
Right. I think that's the important thing too. That's the myth is the idea that post recording you would be able to get better resolution or better zoom capabilities than you had when you were recording.
Gil Illescas:
Well, how many times have we got that call? You guys said that I could do zoom with this camera.
Speaker 2:
Exactly. All the time.
Gil Illescas:
They think it's optical zoom after recording.
James Campbell:
Yeah, actually I've had that with PTZs. I've had people where I'm explaining, new to the industry, they're looking at a PTZ and I'm demonstrating it and at some point I hear their impression is that a PTZ means that you can zoom in and zoom out on recording. So you can go from seeing, if you zoom the PTZ in and you're seeing something 500 feet away, you know can go ahead and you can zoom out and see something 10 feet away from the camera. And of course that's not the way it works. Optical zoom is stuff you have to preplan for, you have to make sure the camera's there and the spot needs to be before the incident occurs otherwise you don't get any benefit out of it.
Gil Illescas:
Right.
Speaker 2:
That's such a good point. So what about all these fancy new AI based cameras and things like that that? Do they work? Do they make this enhancing a little more real?
James Campbell:
I get asked this kind of stuff all the time. [inaudible 00:08:46].
Speaker 2:
Uh oh.
Gil Illescas:
We lost you, James.
James Campbell:
I guess I'll just use the built in one now and twist over here. So yeah, I'm into photography and I get ads for enhance your photos all the time. And it's always AI. It's always AI based. And I think, I actually have a test here that you can see. So I got a couple different images that we threw into one of these AI platforms and hopefully it showcases really what's going on here. So the first one is a two megapixel camera with somebody standing 50 feet away from it. And if you zoom into it, you're going to see you're not getting a lot of detail, there's no details on the plate, anything like that, because you're just not there. The resolution's not high enough for him to be that far from the camera.
And then what I did is put it into this enhancing program, AI enhancing, all that kind of stuff. And as you can see, it doesn't do much. There's no additional detail with this image is the point. Because if you zoom in here and you see on the enhanced one, it has the little water mark on the left there, you'll see the plate is just even more blurry than actually other one because it's doing its best to try to basically figure out what's around it and enhance it, for lack of better words, and try to actually pull more detail out of it.
But when you're talking security footage, if you were printing this, this would actually not be a bad thing to do. Put it through something that can increase the resolution so you can print a bigger photo, that's something that does happen. Because what it does is it sees a little greenery next to it, puts another pixel next to it, and that's how it makes it bigger basically. But despite the fact that it's AI and all that fancy kind of verbiage with stuff, it's still the same situation. If you don't have the detail in the initial image, you're not going to get detail out of the final product either.
Gil Illescas:
Right. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, the AV world has technology and camera capability because it's also 10 times more expensive to do things after the fact that the security video camera world doesn't really do. But if I'm correct, I don't believe that holds up in court because I think you're breaking the watermark at that point?
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Gil Illescas:
Yeah. And that's of course unacceptable. I think.
James Campbell:
No, that's actually something that I was talking about this episode with Matthew, our CEO, and the first thing he brought up is even if it did exist, it'd potentially be inadmissible in court just because who's to say that that program actually does that. And I think there's obviously a major thing beyond just being able to see actually if it really fully exists or not. But yeah, if it's not admissible, even if it existed, you really can't use it either.
Gil Illescas:
Instagram and apps, there's all kinds of things that play with video. They all do their surface enhancements so to speak. But it's kind of an overlay. As far as I know, it's more of an overlay rather than doing anything to the actual video. So it wouldn't really help your cause at all.
James Campbell:
Yeah, the ones in Hollywood and stuff like that, it's interesting because you can go back and buy a Blu-ray of Goodfellows for example, great movie. And all of a sudden, I remember the first time I saw it, because it's an old movie, you don't really expect it to look that good, and you're able to read bottle labels on the table and he's saying he is a funny guy and all that stuff. And so I'm like, "Oh my god, this is crazy. How did they do that?" But film is actually very high resolution back in the day, they didn't have the technology to actually display it at its full detail level. So now they can actually scan that stuff, put it in. So that's where I think some of the myth maybe comes from. It's a good point. Well they can do it, how come we can't?
And it's because they actually are dealing with more detail and resolution than in the first place and they're just kind of bringing that detail to light versus whatever your security camera footage has, that's what it's got. Whatever you have then is what you're going to deal with on the recording and there's no way to enhance it further after that.
Gil Illescas:
Well I also think that science and technology, I'm pretty sure NASA has ways of enhancing video, right? But your four camera system would be $250,000.
Speaker 2:
Exactly. Right.
James Campbell:
NASA models.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. No, this is why military bases love PTZs and live monitor them, right? It's because they need to physically enhance, they need to get as much detail as possible.
Gil Illescas:
But key term right there is live monitor.
Speaker 2:
Well 100%. And that's exactly right. And that's I think a good transition to, we now are in the understanding that this enhance myth that lives in this industry has been busted. It doesn't actually exist. It's totally fake. You can only do so much with the footage that you have and you'll only ever have the max resolution that you recorded in. Right?
Gil Illescas:
Right.
Speaker 2:
So what's best practice? How do we recommend getting the best possible image that you can get out of security cameras?
Gil Illescas:
Recording in the highest resolution that you can afford and having good coverage, field of view. Those are my two. What are yours, James?
James Campbell:
I think exactly what you're saying, even understanding the capability of the camera. So if you're shopping for a camera and you see that this one's two megapixel, this one's four megapixel, this one's eight, what does that mean? Just looking, if you're talking to somebody, ask what does that mean in the real world? What does that mean for being able to see a person? We have on our website images from right off the camera where you can specifically compare and contrast somebody at 50 feet. Here's one at 1080p, here's one at four megapixel, here's one at 4k. And understand that whatever capability you have there is not going to be enhanced after the fact. So plan ahead of time to make sure that if you're worried about somebody being 50 feet away, that you go with a higher resolution camera so that way when somebody is 50 feet from the building, you know you're going to be able to get them reliably. That's the big thing is planning it out, making sure that you have the right equipment the first time and so you're not in the situation where you have a bad piece of footage and you're desperately trying to get any detail out of it and it's just not there.
Gil Illescas:
Right. Correct. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. High resolution, the right coverage. Absolutely. Any final thoughts on this myth?
Gil Illescas:
Oh, when all else fails, just start blasting away at the keyboard.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Gil Illescas:
That always works.
Speaker 2:
Yes. And say some type of fancy machinery, like the A6 or whatever.
James Campbell:
Yeah. You got to get that server. And that's the other thing with those episodes, there's always some kind of delay with getting the server. They're like, "Got to get this from across the country. It's such a unique piece of hardware, we got to send it over there," and increase the drama in the episode. So make sure you know where your enhancement machine is at all times is my final thoughts. But my real final thoughts is exactly what I just said before. Plan ahead.
Gil Illescas:
Plan ahead. Yup.
Speaker 2:
Plan ahead. Absolutely. Well that's awesome. So that's it. That'll wrap up our first episode of Security Myth Busting. Thanks so much for joining us, we really appreciate it. There will be additional links to some additional resources regarding resolution and zooming and all that stuff down in the description below. So be sure to check those out. And feel free to leave any comments if you have any thoughts. Really appreciate it.
Gil Illescas:
Love to hear it.
Speaker 2:
Thanks so much and be sure to tune into the next episode.