Enhance button solves crime

One of the standard scenes in science fiction movies and TV shows is the image enhancing scene.

PROTAGONIST (furrowing brow): “Computer, zoom to grid 24 14 and enhance.”

Like all good screenplay tropes, it has its own page on the TV Tropes site.

My friend Steve, who has an image processing blog, wrote about the phenomenon here and the follow-up comments suggested a raft of funny scenes. Image processing guys, as you can imagine, love this stuff. And here’s a video montage of “enhance scenes”:

I’m telling you this to set up this excellent real life story. Gizmodo posted this recently: Accidental Photobomb Leads to Bag Thief’s Capture. I like to flip between the two pictures while saying “Computer, enhance” in an English accent.