TWO PART QUESTION - We've all seen the movies/TV shows where the police/feds/spies use computer software to take a grainy photo and do a clean-up to see a better picture and more details. I assume the concept is executed by some sort of uber-power pixel-smoothing or anti-aliasing type of algorithms to fill in the blanks based on deductive processing.PART 1: How real is this technology in the public/commercial software world? I'm not asking about any speculation on alleged secret gov software or such, I just want to know where we actually are with this concept today? How much is fully automated vs human-assisted. PART 2: Assuming there actually is some reality with this technology for photographs the second part of this question is how (if at all) has this been applied to videos? Again the issue of fully automated vs human assisted is of interest here.At the heart of this post is the ultimate question of how viable is today's software for being able to take an old VHS or DVD recording and process the frames to create a new HD-resolution remaster. Considering that doing this would mean cleaning up tens-of-thousands of frames for even a simple wedding video I am not expecting this technology to be fast of course.NOTE: Per in-topic and meta discussions I went ahead and cross-posted this in two other suggested SE forums to acquire their viewpoints and expertise on this matter. So far (it is still a little early in the day so to speak) I have received some pretty interesting information in 2 of the 3.When this is all done (when good answers have been selected) I would appreciate a way to merge these for the benefit of all three SE communities:Computer Graphics: What is the state-of-the-art on using computers to clean-up images?Signal Processing: https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/28168Video Production: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/17363
What is the state-of-the-art on using computers to clean-up images?
image processing;photo realistic;video