Stacking Security Camera Frames like Astrophotography

[JCBiggs]

In astrophotography, you take many images and stack them in software, and get a result that is sharp and free of noise.    Is it possible to do the same thing with frames from a security camera recording?  say a license plate?   if you can get 3 seconds of license plates, thats 90 frames.   Thnking about it, im sure this is possible, you would just have to align the frames, but what software do you use to seperate each individual frame?  ( i know nothing about video editing.. sorry)

[Guest]

Most professional video editing programs have an option to output video as an image sequence.

 

[Radium_Angel]

29 minutes ago, JCBiggs said:

In astrophotography, you take many images and stack them in software, and get a result that is sharp and free of noise.    Is it possible to do the same thing with frames from a security camera recording?  say a license plate?   if you can get 3 seconds of license plates, thats 90 frames.   Thnking about it, im sure this is possible, you would just have to align the frames, but what software do you use to seperate each individual frame?  ( i know nothing about video editing.. sorry)

The trouble there is if the video feed is out of focus, or blurry, you might not have any luck.

It's going to require a fair amount of time and manual attention to detail and you might not end up any better than when you started.

Good luck.

[JCBiggs]

31 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

The trouble there is if the video feed is out of focus, or blurry, you might not have any luck.

It's going to require a fair amount of time and manual attention to detail and you might not end up any better than when you started.

Good luck.

so most of the frames, the back of the vehicle is pretty much in focus, but the license plate letters look like a pixelated mess.  however it looks like stacking them could "statistically" provide  a readable number.   This is essentially how deep sky stacker works.  I dont have a professional editing program to get the frames in sequence.  is there an open source option that anyone knows of?    If so I can crop down to just the bumper, which is easily alignable in software, then run the whole stack through deep sky stacker. 

[porina]

https://www.autostakkert.com/

 

I've only used this for astro use, but in theory it could be used for other things, and they even have a number plate example on that page. Assuming the video is a compatible format with the software, you can just feed it directly and no need to grab frames.

 

The software has some alignment modes. If the number plate stays in roughly the same place, you could use the area tracking option. Otherwise... you might have more work to do to stabilise it before you try to stack it.

 

Another similar one is registax, but I haven't actually used it for stacking as its interface is more difficult to use. https://www.astronomie.be/registax/

It does have a better post "enhancement" function you can use to post process the output of AS!. Do note for astro use, it is normal for the output to appear blurry after stacking, and it will take some processing to try and pull out detail.

[JCBiggs]

18 minutes ago, porina said:

https://www.autostakkert.com/

 

I've only used this for astro use, but in theory it could be used for other things, and they even have a number plate example on that page. Assuming the video is a compatible format with the software, you can just feed it directly and no need to grab frames.

 

The software has some alignment modes. If the number plate stays in roughly the same place, you could use the area tracking option. Otherwise... you might have more work to do to stabilise it before you try to stack it.

 

Another similar one is registax, but I haven't actually used it for stacking as its interface is more difficult to use. https://www.astronomie.be/registax/

It does have a better post "enhancement" function you can use to post process the output of AS!. Do note for astro use, it is normal for the output to appear blurry after stacking, and it will take some processing to try and pull out detail.

Thanks, but my issue is not with stacking . I have done that alot.  its how to get the sequence of images out of the video camera feed.  The only thing I can come up with right now is screen shots frame by frame on my 4k monitor. 

[porina]

1 hour ago, JCBiggs said:

Thanks, but my issue is not with stacking . I have done that alot.  its how to get the sequence of images out of the video camera feed.  The only thing I can come up with right now is screen shots frame by frame on my 4k monitor. 

The software I linked can take an avi, if it is already in that format or converted to such. I've never had to bulk extract frames myself.