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Amped FIVE Update: Reports in PDF and DOC, new Deblurring Modes, and more

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We just launched a new version of Amped FIVE today, with a bunch of new filters and improvements.

The main changes are:

  • Saving reports in PDF and DOC, as well as the current HTML format.
  • New modes for Motion Deblurring when there is a replica effect
  • New Nonlinear Deblurring to use when motion is not linear
  • A new CLAHE (contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization) filter

Let’s check these out one by one:

New Report Modes

The report generated in Amped FIVE Professional is one of its most important features since our very first version. With the click of a button, Amped FIVE generates an HTML report that includes all the used filters, the description for every filter, the parameters used and their meaning, and references for the scientific papers or books where the methodology is explained and usually validated by peer review.

With today’s update we also allow you to generate the report directly in PDF and DOC (viewing Word docs require that Microsoft Word is installed on the system). Furthermore, you can also decide which action to do after the generation, like opening the folder containing the file or loading the file either in a PDF viewer, Microsoft Word or the browser for HTML.

The menu item is still where it used to be:

report1

But now, it opens a dialog that allows you to select format and action (which of course gets defaulted for the next time you access the command).

report2
report3

Motion Deblurring with Replicas

With Amped FIVE, we try to solve common issues, but also some strange things that can happen on occasion. In some cases, we have seen an effect where the blurring was not a continuous line, but two distinct replicas of the file. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any sample that was not coming from a real case (as we keep the cases we work on confidential) and we don’t understand the source of this issue to recreate it in real situations, so to show you, we created a synthetic sample. This is something we do very rarely, but when we do, we explicitly tell you. Our samples are usually real. If not, we advise.

replica-deblurring

Nonlinear Deblurring

There are times when the motion of the subject is not linear. For this purpose, we just added a new filter called Nonlinear Deblurring. A lot of effort has been put into naming this filter. What do we call it? Custom Deblurring? Too generic! Curved Deblurring? Too informal. So we settled on Nonlinear Deblurring or similar. Then we needed to understand the proper form of Nonlinear vs Non-linear vs Non Linear. Luckily, StackExchange had a very good question which provided the proper answer: english.stackexchange.com/questions/32428/can-there-be-a-hyphen-in-nonlinear (Yes, we are that picky even when naming a filter!).

Going back to the technical stuff. The newly named “Nonlinear Deblurring” filter allows the user to basically draw the PSF (point spread function) which defines the shape of the blur and corrects a complex motion effect.

Below you can find a sample of how it works.

nonlinear-deblurring

Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization

Histogram Equalization is an excellent way to adjust the overall brightness and contrast of the image in an automatic way. However, adjusting the image as a whole, does not always improve the specific part of the picture you are interested in. For this reason, we introduced some time ago, the possibility to select the region of the image where to calculate the proper histogram equalization parameters, that are then applied to the whole picture.

With the new update, we do even more: we added the (Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization CLAHE) filter that performs local contrast enhancement on the image as a whole.

As an example, the following image has both very bright and very dark areas.

clahe

If we apply Histogram Equalization, the roll up banner on the right becomes well readable, but the view out of the window becomes too bright.

histogram-equalization

CLAHE is very effective in keeping detail on both areas and making even extremely subtle color and brightness variation very visible, giving an almost HDR effect.

In the following image you can see that both the roll up banner and the cars outside are visible.

clahe-colors

There are color artifacts due to the strong processing effect that can be attenuated using the filter in “Intensity” mode rather than “Color” mode. In this case, anyway, the image looks almost in grayscale since the three RGB channels are balanced in the same way.

clahe-intensity

The Bottom Line

As you can see, we strive to make Amped FIVE always more complete, trying to meet all the possible needs of forensic image and video analysis. We never stop our research and development activities and you can be assured that a lot more is coming.

Update your Amped FIVE version now… as long you still have a valid support plan! If you need to renew your SMS plan, please contact us or one of our authorized partners.

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