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Zoom… Enhance… Magnify

I enjoy the CSI TV shows. My wife and I regularly watch all three versions of it; Las Vegas, Miami, and New York. I think each spin-off has ended up being less interesting than the last, but one thing is really starting to bug me about all of them… The computers.

I don’t know much about forensic science other than what I see on the shows, so I don’t know how accurate the DNA analysis and fingerprinting and other things are, but the computers have gotten ridiculous lately. In an episode of CSI: NY we watched last night, the CSI people were watching a crummy surveillance video of a guy in a pawn shop. He had his head down so you couldn’t see him on camera. So what did the CSIs do? Just zoom in on the shop owner’s glasses of course! Of course it was pixelated, but no matter, just press the enhance button to get a crystal clear, high resolution image of the shop owner’s face, as well as a nice shot of the guy in the reflection of the glasses. Nevermind that they were dealing with a grainy, low resolution surveillance video, this software can create image information out of thin air!

Then we have all of the other ridiculously specialized software that I just don’t see existing. In the same episode last night, a guy was bitten on the ear by another man in a fight. So, to identify who bit the man, all they had to do was take impressions of everyone’s teeth, then fire up their “teeth - bitemark matching software” which was able to quickly scan each set of teeth and match them exactly to the bitemarks on the ear of the victim. Now how many times are you going to use a piece of software like that? Enough to warrant spending thousands or millions of dollars developing it? I think not.

Finally, we have the databases of seemingly limitless information available to CSI at any given time. Again, in an episode last night they needed to find out which companies in the New York area had two different kinds of duct tape so they could compare the two types of adhesives. No problem! We’ll just cross-reference the duct tape distributor database with the heat-retardant duct tape database to see which shops in the area carry both types. Now I’m sure the CSI have lots of information available to them, and some of it is stored in a database, but come on… Duct tape distributors? That just doesn’t seem like something that would be cataloged with any kind of precision or consistency.

I know they create these programs just to make it look more interesting than it really is, since it’s a TV show and all. But recently it seems like a crutch to their story. If you’re running out of time in an episode, just have an incredible piece of software create information out of nothing so we can arrest the guy and move on to next week’s show.

That being said, I still watch these shows every week because they are awesome. :)

The bite mark software is pretty real. The biggest problem I have with all of the software in the shows (besides the examples you’ve provided) are the stupid “flashy UI” they all have. To say even the real software is “enhanced” is stretching it.

Yeah some of the programs they show have beep beep boop sound effects and everything. Slick animations and real time scaling and rendering… I’ve seen less complicated and flashy UI’s in video games.

But I guess it would be pretty boring if they showed a Unix commandline up there or something. :)