Discussion about "enhanced" video of George Zimmerman

Hello all! I thought I would bring this up to the attention of the Purdue Digital Signal Processing community for discussion. As you may have heard, ABC news obtained an exclusive video of George Zimmerman in police custody. They sent the video to a company called "Forensic Protection" to be "digitally enhanced". ABC claims that the expert forensic team "sharpened what the tape really shows", which they conclude are wounds behind the head of Zimmerman. The processed used by the forensic team is explained a bit in this section of the company's website. I am embedding ABC's video below so you can hear ABC's claims and see the images for yourself. My question is the following:

Who thinks the stuff that appears on the back of Zimmerman's head in the enhanced video existed truly in reality, and who thinks that it is an artifact created in the "restoration" process?

I would hope that at least all my ECE438 students know that image sharpening is very tricky. In particular, processes that attempt to enhance the high frequency details of an image run the risk of enhancing the noise in the image as well. So an important question is: are we seeing enhanced noise, or enhanced signal? I find it highly suspicious that a single frame of the video is presented as evidence here, since if it is really signal, then it would most likely show up in many frames. Moreover, there are obvious visible artifacts in the non-highlighted region of the featured frame: if artifacts were created elsewhere, how do we know that the features that appear behind the head are not artifacts too? Comments please. -pm

• Write a comment here.
  • answer here.
• Write a comment here.