C.S.I. New York – Video enhancement
I finally got caught up on C.S.I. New York. As I’ve said before, having a 16 month old in the house sure does put you behind on some of your favorite shows. As far as I can tell, the season finale only had one scene worthy of a WeCallBull, but it was a dandy.
Mack Taylor and his crew were at a dead end in their search for a kidnapping victim. All they had to work with was a videotape of the victim reading some demands. There was nothing about the background or the ambient noise that could possibly pinpoint a location.
The tape was worthless… until the kidnapped reached across in front of the camera to turn off the tape. His hand was in the shot for a fraction of the second. They froze a frame from the video and then enhanced the image of the hand until you could see the ridges on one finger. They were then able to capture a fingerprint from that enhanced image and identify the kidnapper. I’ve got to Call Bull on that.
Video enhancement is a common tool for television shows nowadays. Shows like C.S.I. are always taking blurry images and clearing them up. You do have to give them a little leeway because there is some amazing enhancement software out there, but this just goes too far. Fingerprint matching doesn’t leave much room for error; you either find and exact match or you don’t. I don’t care how complex of an algorithm you use for enhancement there is a significant margin of error from those areas being "filled in" by the software.
It did occur to me that if the video was shot in HD, the software would not have to fill in nearly as many gaps and a fingerprint match might be possible. However, this video was shot in a 4×3 aspect ratio instead of a 16×9. Therefore it was standard def. (old style) and simply wouldn’t have had enough data to allow for an accurate fingerprint.
