What is Amped Five?

Amped Five is a software for analysis, processing and enhancement of images and videos, mainly addressed to the forensics, scientific investigations and intelligence forces. Thus, Five's main field of application is to clarify images and videos coming from crime scenes and captured with the most different devices, such as digital cameras, CCTV and camera-phones.

Which systems is it available for?

Amped Five has been developed on Microsoft Windows systems. However, we are planning the porting to other operating systems as soon as possible, depending to the market demand. Mac version should be available within the 2009.

What are the differences with general purpose video and image processing software?

General purpose image processing software lacks tools for enhancement and restoration, while gives a lot of creative-oriented features, which are generally useless and actually not suggested while working on material with lawful implications.
The primary goal of Five is to obtain more information from every kind of source, even when the quality is very bad.

Does it work only with license plates?

No, it works in the same way independently of the content of the image, so you can use it to improve faces, fingerprints, objects and so on. Many of our examples are based on license plates because, containing "discrete" information, you can very effectively appreciate the result: you can read it or you can't. Furthermore, being a static object, restoring a license plate combining different views is easier than working with faces, for example, whose motion model is much more complex.

Which is the minimum quality of an image to restore it?

The quality can't be objectively defined, and it's actually created by the contributions of many different factors, such as pixel resolution, brightness and compression. Thus the only way to see if it is possible to restore effectively an image is to try. One very important point on which we want to be very clear, is that if the image contains corrupted information, in many conditions we can restore it; but, if there is no information, we can't do anything. Sorry but this is the truth, we are not going to extract a license plate from six white pixels.

In what way does Five differ to other forensic image processing softwares?

Five offers both standard image processing algorithms and bleeding-edge techniques coming from the world of research. Details on the employed algorithms are given in a way that it is possible to provide the court with all the scientific and technical background of the work that has been done on the material.
Moreover, we want to provide a one-for-all solution where a single piece of software allows to solve all the problems related to every kind of data. Five allows to modify every step of the processing in every moment and see the final result in real-time. Then, the same processing can be applied to any other source data to be processed in the same way, being it a single image, a sequence of images or a video file. Unlike other systems, Five is not a plug-in for other software. It is a single piece of software that can easily treat every kind of video and images and allow to save hours of work.

I would like to have *xyz* feature, what should I do?

The main purpose of Five is to be useful, so just contact us, we'll be glad to consider with you whether the feature you requested can be added, or if it is already under development. 

Why did you call it Five?

Different explanations can be given:

• five is a number, numbers are something very simple to understand but very powerful, as, we think Amped Five, is;
• FIVE is the acronym of "Forensic Image and Video Enhancement";
• when you succeed in doing something, you give the "hi five";
• 5 it's graphically nice.