Eulerian video magnification technology makes TV crime show style “zoom and enhance” possible

Crime shows like CSI and NCIS love to use some sort of magical “zoom and enhance” technology to zoom into a shitty security camera still and pull out a perfect license plate number from the killer’s car. On TV, that’s just made up TV technology, but a new method of video magnification could actually make something like that possible. Kinda sorta.

Our goal is to reveal temporal variations in videos that are difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye and display them in an indicative manner. Our method, which we call Eulerian Video Magnification, takes a standard video sequence as input, and applies spatial decomposition, followed by temporal filtering to the frames. The resulting signal is then amplified to reveal hidden information. Using our method, we are able to visualize the flow of blood as it fills the face and also to amplify and reveal small motions. Our technique can run in real time to show phenomena occurring at temporal frequencies selected by the user.

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