Sunday, January 5, 2014

Scientists: Police can identify suspects' faces from victims' eyes

Scientists: Police can identify suspects' faces from victims' eyesRob Jenkins and a team of scientists at the University of York's Department of Psychology have demonstrated that people can recognize a suspects' face reflected in a victims's cornea 80 percent of the time:..

Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face photographs for hidden information. By zooming in on high-resolution face photographs, we were able to recover images of unseen bystanders from reflections in the subjects' eyes. To establish whether these bystanders could be identified from the reflection images, we presented them as stimuli in a face matching task.
Accuracy in the face matching task was well above chance (50%), despite the unpromising source of the stimuli. Participants who were unfamiliar with the bystanders' faces performed at 71% accuracy, and participants who werefamiliar with the faces performed at 84% accuracy. In a test of spontaneous recognition, observers could reliably name a familiar face from an eye reflection image. For crimes in which the victims are photographed (e.g., hostage taking, child sex abuse), reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help to identify perpetrators.
They found out that the test subjects could identify faces that were 30,000 times smaller than the actual face—as small as 18 pixels wide by 20 pixels high. Something like this:
Scientists: Police can identify suspects' faces from victims' eyes1
Of course, you still need a very high resolution photograph to get those pixels, but with cameras' sensor density increasing continuously, the idea of investigators being able to take a smartphone photo to identify and capture a suspect—after screaming "ENHANCE!"—will soon be a reality.

Source:http://sploid.gizmodo.com/police-can-now-identify-a-suspects-face-from-victim-ey-1491686284

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