The Unwanted Blog

One of the more common, yet more irritatingly dead wrong tropes in modern fiction is known as the “Enhance Button.” We’ve all seen it… a crappy security camera video catches a glimpse of the bad guy’s car in one frame as it drive by a block away. The license plate is 2.5 pixels wide, but due to the magic of the Enhance Button, the license plate number is brought into legibility.

Bah.

Despite the fact that a great many examples of the “Enhance Button” are anti-science gibberish, there are a few ways to enhance certain images that can turn craptastic images into fairly remarkable ones. Take, for example, this screenshot of a photo of the full-scale mockup of the Convair XP-92 ramjet powered delta winged interceptor. The photo as supplied to me was scanned as a one-bit image… black and white pixels, no shades of gray.

Notice that the image *really* sucks. In no way is it ready for public presentation. Here is a close-up at full resolution:

And when the full image is resized to be smaller, it stills stinks:

Note that while you can see what’s going on, it’s just plain a bad image. So… what can be done?

Easy: use the Enhance Button!

In this case, the Enhance Button is a simple two-step process. First, have your image processing program convert it from a one-bit black-and-white image to a Gray Scale image (shades of gray rather than just black and white pixels). This won’t immediately do anything. But the next step will: blur the image. This takes each pixel and smears it into the pixels surrounding it. For a white pixels in the midst of a large mass of white pixels, nothing much happens. But where the image is a mishmash of black and white pixels, the smearing processes averages the  black from a black pixel with the white from a nearby white pixel. The result is this:

While hardly the sort of photo quality that would win awards, it is clear that the result is a vast improvement over the 1-bit original.

Another way to look at it is to start with a good grayscale image, such as this one:

Let’s look at the cockpit at full rez:

And now let’s screw it up and turn it into a 1-bit image:

Now that’s just sad. However… when you use the previously described “enhance button,” it turns into this:

Much has been lost. But  notice that the image is not a complete disaster… it is a much more realistic image than the black-and-white version. The universe, as it turns out, is composed of shades of gray. Only Sith deal in absolutes.

In discussing this process with a friend (yes, I have one of those… same friend, as it turns out, who’s responsible for THESE), the subject of QR codes came up. For those unaware, QR codes are two-dimensional grids of black and white pixels. Essentially modernized UPC codes, these can be packed full of scads of data. The idea was raised of using the Enhance Button on some QR codes to see if anything comes out. Well… maybe. With these the “blur” function was used repeatedly to really smear things out.

Here’s a simple one:

A more complex one:

And a really complex one:

Another complex one:

I don’t see a lot there, certainly not the secrets of the universe popping out. However, by blurring the images  some interesting shapes can be seen in a few of ’em. I have a sneaking suspicion that if QR codes were made from numerical lists, or patterns of alphanumerics chosen for the purpose (the QR codes above were made from blocks of text), then some distinct patterns might emerge.