Identifying license plate number of a thief's car from a video Motivation:

I recently had my laptop stolen, with lots of pictures of my family, research work and other very important stuff. Of course the theft has been reported, but I think people here are more competent in image processing compared to the local police station :)

Video Recordings

The stealing was captured by a security camera, original .dav files can be downloaded from here:


ch10.dav
ch13.dav


Converted .avi files can be downloaded (or played in browser) from here:


ch10.avi
ch13.avi


Description

In the file named ch10 (full name: HCVR_ch10_main_20160501143700_20160501143947) the thief's car enters the frame from the right at 0:48 . In the file named ch13 (full name: HCVR_ch13_main_20160501143811_20160501144205), in the first 2 minutes, the thief's car enters the frame from the right, makes U-turn, steals my stuff,  makes a U-turn again and go.

What has been tried?

I tried cropping a few frames around the license plate, stretch so that the plate will be on same position and size on every frame, and averaging. The result wasn't better from the original frames :(

How could I get the number?
Averaging may not be the best option, due to motion compensation in video frames: one number (say $8$) may be extrapolated for another (say $3$) on a different JPEG block. It might be interesting to dig into the compressed video format, check motion vectors, but this requires a little bit of hacking. 

Some software which can help:


Amped FIVE (used by the local CSI here, I learned it directly from them), with a live demo
Focus Magic, with a review here.


Unfortunately, while your videos are pretty good, the problem sounds quite difficult. For alight side, I'd like to share the following picture, that tells about issues in image forensics: