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Photos: Pavilion Five Star Bank robbery suspect

By Howard B. Owens

jeff saquella

why is it that bank cameras always have fuzzy shots of robbery suspects....you'd think that with todays technology you would get clear easy to identify pictures

Apr 7, 2012, 9:43pm Permalink
Mark Potwora

Jeff i agree...who can tell what this guy looks like from the above pictures....they need to invest in better camera's....the Google satellite gives you a better picture of your house from space than those bank camera's..

Apr 7, 2012, 10:53pm Permalink
RICHARD L. HALE

I don't know which is more difficult...trying to identify a bank robber from these pictures....or trying to hear a City Council, or Town Board meeting on tv....

Ain't technology great !!!

Apr 8, 2012, 12:44am Permalink
Destin Danser

The photos are so "fuzzy" because of the nature of how surveillance cameras work. They are low-resolution video cameras, with fairly wide angles of view. The problem comes in when you need to take a single frame from that video, which is already a low resolution, and crop it majorly to zoom in on a single subject.

There is technology to counter this problem... You could get a super high res camera to make cropping that far viable. I'm not talking HD here, I'm talking 4k video, which is 3.5 times as high a resolution as HD video. This would give lots of cropping leeway, but the cheapest 4k camera produced now is about $50,000.

You could install a TON of cameras with narrower fields of view so cropping wouldn't be necessary, but this would leave many spots that's aren't covered by video.

The accepted option in the industry is smart surveillance cameras that zoom in on a person when they detect motion, and therefore get a clearer picture of them. There are still problems with this though... There is potential for the camera to miss someone. Also, these systems cost insane amounts of money.

Apr 8, 2012, 8:45am Permalink
Gary Spencer

Why don't they enhance the photos on a supercomputer and enter it into the FBIs CODIS Facial Recognition Software, and in less than an hour they could catch this guy, after all, it works on CSI.

Apr 8, 2012, 8:57am Permalink

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