Image enhancement has been a big part of crime shows and mystery movies for a long time. As demonstrated in the following video montage, it has become something of a cliche:

Technology is starting to catch up with the imagination. If you have video (or multiple photos) rather than a still image, and if you have enough processing power, it becomes possible to do some pretty amazing image enhancements. You can see one example on this page:

The Super Resolution demo

[The rest of that presentation is pretty interesting. If you look at the last slide on the last page, he is talking about processors in 2015 having tens of billions of transistors and 10 to 100 cores per chip.]

How did they create such a clear imagine? The technique is sometimes called multi-image fusion and is nicely explained here:

See also:

See also:
- Photoshop may finally be getting easy enough for mere mortals to use it
- The worlds largest photograph contains 26 billion pixels