I noticed tonight that there are pictures of Bin Laden with his arm in a position that displays his wrist watch, which is digital. I am sure that some intelligence person has done this, but if is was possible to zoom in on the watch it would be easy to see the date which give a time frame for the picture. Is it possible to do this with any accuracy?
If it is captured from a video source (even broadcast quality) then it is very unlikely that enough detail remains in the image; you can’t (despite all those moments in the movies when they say ‘can you enhance that for me’ and the big pixels turn into sharp detail) restore detail to an image after it has been lost.
Well, you can restore detail after it’s been apparently lost, especially if you have multiple similar images to work with (as with a video source). But even there, it’s difficult, and I imagine that the date on a wristwatch would be out of range even so. Consider: The date indicator on a wristwatch is usually about a millimeter high. To distinguish between two different dates, you’d need about a tenth of a millimeter of resolution. The total field of the image is probably around a meter or so (for a head and upper body shot), and a TV video image is 480 pixels high. Crunching all the numbers together, this means we’d need resolution of about a twentieth of a pixel.
At a rough estimate, if we knew the exact make of his watch, and he kept it directly face-on to the camera for a total of 15 seconds of the same video, then we might be able to see the date on the watch. Assuming, of course, that the picture quality is perfect (no loss of information at all, except for pixellation), that the watch is one which shows the date at all, and that it’s correct.
What does it matter? He died ten months ago.