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Participant
August 7, 2017
Question

Need help identifying a license plate

  • August 7, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 785 views

Last Wednesday two guys started 2 fires on my property and drove off. I have night vision cameras but trying to extract a moving vehicle's plate is impossible, right?  Well I'm not so sure. I've identified the best frame of the video and I can see my state's name Massachusetts and the 6 symbols below. Beside fooling around with basic things like brightness, contrast, exposure, sharpening etc. Does anyone have an idea for an advanced method to lift the numbers?  Is there a method to darken certain pixels globally?  I know basically where the numbers or letters are. The gorilla technique I will try is individually darkening the darker pixels. Anyone have a better method?  My 86 year old father who is bedridden was near the fire. He would not have been able to get up had the house caught fire. Police and fire are investigating but in a high crime area this is going to be low priority to them. So any help would be appreciated.

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    2 replies

    davescm
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    August 7, 2017

    spookmart  wrote

    ..........I can see my state's name Massachusetts and the 6 symbols below.

    What 6 symbols? There is nothing in that screenshot even when enhancing the contrast.

    There are only 4505 pixels and the video compression has grouped them into blocks of 16. Leaving out the left single column and bottom single row that makes the image consist of 28x13 square blocks or , effectively that reduces your image to just 273 pixels I hope you have more than this to go on.

    If you have several frames you may be able to combine them using the technique below but you really need more pixels than that to pull out detail

    https://petapixel.com/2015/02/21/a-practical-guide-to-creating-superresolution-photos-with-photoshop/

    Dave

    gener7
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    August 7, 2017

    Is that the actual image size?  85 x 53 pixels is a gray thumbnail without any detail.

    spookmartAuthor
    Participant
    August 7, 2017

    Yes, I didn't say it was easy. There is some faint detail.

    gener7
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    August 7, 2017

    I have a laptop and those are not the best screens. I'll leave this to others with better hardware.

    Do hope you find out who it was.