Steve on Image ProcessingJuly 3rd, 2007Image processing in the moviesI'm blogging from vacation today, so here's a fun topic for you to consider. (As far as I know it has nothing to do with MATLAB.) What are your favorite movies or TV shows in which image processing played a starring role? Realistic or (more likely) not. I'll start: The movie that always sticks in my mind related to image processing is the Kevin Costner movie No Way Out. I remember it because my graduate school buddies and I spent so much time making fun of it. Add your nominations using the comment link below. 22 Responses to “Image processing in the movies”Leave a Reply |
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I think 300 is the god of all movies in that aspect.
Sri—I wasn’t really talking about CGI effects in movies. Rather, I had in mind movies in which characters actually use image processing in some way. Like enhancing a reflected image of a face on someone’s glasses taken from a satellite image. :-)
I enjoy a lot of those government conspiracy/ spy movies. Many of them involve some type of image processing from surveillance cameras or satellite imagery. Two movies that come to mind are Enemy of the State and Bourne Supremacy.
Steve, you took mine!
I always chuckle when the FBI/CIA/someotheragent zooms in on a satellite image to see some water vapor to then back-calculate how fast ice was melting so he could tell the temperature at that spot at the time. Of course, he does this just in the nick of time to avoid catastrophe. I’ve read a few sat images and it just ain’t so, but makes for a good thriller.
There have also been a few uses of IP on TV in the “Numb3rs” series. Although a bit geeky, it at least attempts to explain when in your life you would use what you learned in math class.
Have a nice vaca,
Rob
DejaVu!
http://video.movies.go.com/dejavu/
Like when they applied face recognition techniques to find a briefcase over all the pictures taken in the city- plausible, yes perhaps, but not in 10 seconds! I like when one actor comments that using that for trying to find a briefcase would be too trivial.
The film ‘Blade Runner’ based on the Philip K. Dick science
fiction novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. The
Voight-Kampff machine used real-time image analysis of the
eye to detect replicants (androids).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voight-Kampff_machine
Also in the film, Decker (Harrison Ford) used some image
processing (voice recognition-based blowup and enhance)
on photographs he found in a replicants apartment.
A classic movie.
There is a scene in Blade Runner where Harrison Ford uses image processing to “see around a corner” in a photograph to identify someone.
Any episode of CSI makes me groan.
Cheers,
-Bob
I agree that No Way Out contains the most egregious example of gratuitous and inane tech-talk.
“The eigenvalues are way off. Program a Fourier transform.”
I still shudder when I think of that line.
Mark—I hate it when my eigenvalues are way off. I recall another interesting thing about No Way Out. The fact that the image reconstruction / enhancement took so long to compute was an important plot point. It seemed to take about half the movie. Every few minutes a scene would show an update of the monitor with a few more pixels computed.
Most college student will know this: “Enhance, enhance, enhance” from Super Troopers. Classic
I also like how in Numb3rs the “genius” is a “genius” in every field ranging from computer science, thermodynamics, boat building, civil engineering etc.
“No Way Out” is definitely my favorite, as one of those “grad school buddies” of Steve’s who spent time laughing with him about it.
Another good one is “Charlie’s Angels”. I believe it was the second one (”Full Throttle”), in which the girls took a picture of a distant ship from a cell phone camera while hanging from the side of another ship. They were able to enlarge the photo and read the small numbers on the side of the ship. Since I had the exact same cell phone at the time, I know how impossible that was.
One of the “Star Trek” movies — can’t remember which one — shows a picture of the side of a head (from the ear back). Computer extrapolation reveals that the face belongs to Spock. Now that was impressive!!! :-)
“Enemy of the State” with Will Smith is the one I always remember having an especially egregious digital zoom in scene. However, that was recently surpassed by the entire premise of the movie “Deja Vu” with Denzel Washington.
This isn’t exactly image processing except in the wider context of general signal processing…
Last night I saw Transformers and an improbably attractive expert in signal analysis uttered the line
“It’s time to forget Fourier transfers and
think quantum mechanics.”
Someone may like check the precise wording if they happen to see the movie but she definitely said “transfers.”
Needless to say, neither Fourier transfers nor quantum mechanics were relevant to the scene. In fact, they may have missed an ideal opportunity to embed a nerdy in-joke connecting transform theory with the title of the movie. Never mind.
Of course, there’s also the TV shows and movies that get it *right*, like Due South, where there was a potential criminal caught on videotape. The person was just a small face in a large crowd of screaming hockey fans, and at one point one of the characters looking at the security footage demanded that the tech person zoom into the image further and clean it up, to which the tech person responded, “I could zoom in further, but all you would see is a blur: I only have two pixels for his nose.”
I cheered.
Rachel—Nice! I would have cheered, too.
i am in troubled with extracting /segmenting all visible components (visible subimages ) in an image.
can you give me some M-files about that?
thanks!
Thaon—I don’t generally write custom M-files for people. Depending on exactly what you mean by “visible components,” you might find the function bwlabel useful, or perhaps you could look at the segmentation demos for the Image Processing Toolbox.
For me its Mission Impossible-3. The scene in which photos are taken from the mobile camera rotating 360 degrees around the bad man. Then its sent for processing in which the 3-d model is reconstructed and infact a hardware builds a real 3-d mask out of it. The hardware also paints the mask. This scene was so cool and it uses a very apt software-hardware integration of an image processing application.
He Steve
What’s about Gigevision (Gigabit Ethernet camera communication) protocol?
I have a line scan camera with this standard of communication and I want to use Mathlab image processing toolbox to process images “on line” that were grabbed from the camera.
Thank you for your answer.
Walid—The Image Acquisition Toolbox does not support the GigE standard. It’s something we’re looking at.
Hello Steve,
I wanted to ask for your input in any possible workaround on using GigE cameras with Matlab/Simulink/Embedded Code, etc. We are trying to build our own camera using a TI dsp and Micron Imager. Any suggestion will be appreciated.
Thank you in advance,
-Sokol
Sokol—I’m sorry, but your question is way outside my area of expertise.