Using AI-Powered Photo Enhancement for Open Source Intelligence
If you are active on social media, there is a good chance you have seen this viral video of an 1896 snowball fight. A clip originally shot by the French brothers Lumiere, the footage has been scaled up using AI, colorized and now provides for a pleasant 50 second relief from your daily routine of compulsive doomscrolling. As an OSINT aficionado, what got me much more excited than the frolicking f in de siècle Frenchmen was the fact that the image had been scaled up using commerically available AI image enhancement software. Conventional wisdom holds that you cannot really improve the quality of an image. The image holds a certain amount of data and no amount of fancy technology will ever be able to pull additional data out of thin air. But as anyone who has ever processed or analyzed a satellite image knows, the question often is less how much data an image holds and more how much of the data you are able to retrieve. Could AI-powered software help squeeze even more in...