MotionDSP claims to have developed a real-world version of the image enhancement technology featured in the movie Blade Runner.

In fact, the company wants you to send them crappy cell phone videos so that they can prove their point.

MotionDSP’s technology takes low resolution video, extracts information from each frame, and re-constructs a higher resolution video, enabling faces to be recognized and license plates to be read.

Here’s an example of MotionDSP’s technology in action:

Crappy Low Res Video

Crappy Low-Res Video Enhanced with MotionDSP’s Blade Runner Technology

The examples are interesting, and the company’s timing is good.

If they really want to push the Blade Runner angle, though, they should consider putting some skin jobs in the sample videos, and maybe adding a little futuristic synth music courtesy of Vangelis.

MotionDSP is also looking for sample consumer-grade footage to test their system on. Here are their requirements:

• Short videos — under 1 minute in length
• Video from moible phones:
• Video from digital cameras: low resolution (320×240 or smaller)
• Video taken outdoors, or well-lit indoors.
• Video you’re willing to release the rights for (ie: allow us to post on the web as part of the trial)

Details are available at the MotionDSP site.

“Consumers are excited to take images and videos with their mobile phones and webcams and share them on the internet,” said Peyman Milanfar, associate professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founder and Chief Science Advisor of MotionDSP. “But they’re disappointed with the results. More pixels don’t help. You need better signal processing to fix the problem. We hope MotionDSP will be to video what Dolby was to audio.”

“We’re very excited about the convergence of internet video and television,” adds Sean Varah, CEO of MotionDSP. “Our technology is well-suited to enable user-generated video content to reach the broadcast quality television viewers demand.”

via MotionDSP