4 ms·

??? If I had a picture of an apartment building that was big enough, I'd be able to see through every window. How is that even remotely "technological"? You sh

??? If I had a picture of an apartment building that was big enough, I'd be able to see through every window. How is that even remotely "technological"? You shouldn't write a paper saying "a mirror can reflect light" when we already use mirrors every day. Being able to zoom in on an image and see something isn't a breakthrough, holding the details in the picture is. Another analogy: Being able to find a grain of rice in a picture of a factory-sized floor isn't amazing, taking a picture of the entire floor whilst maintaining detail is.

bigiain 8y ago
You're being incredibly disingenuous if you're suggesting this isn't a non-obvious and surprising finding for most people. Everybody "knows" that scene from Blade Runner is "just science fiction". Well now it's not.
- jesterjester 8y ago
  This is definitely not non-obvious. This is incredibly obvious. I've never met someone who doesn't know that eyes are reflective. >"Well now it's not." It never was. Being able to turn corners in a picture was the science fiction part, not the fact that those corners had people in them. Jesus how am I the only person here who understands this concept. It really isn't rocket science... the solution is solved by technology, not by progressive "methods" of using that technology.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    Sure. Eyes are reflective. But resolution is limited. If you are so sure it's "obvious" you can extract recognisable faces from reflections on photographs containing eyes - show me you can do it using any photo containing a headshot you can find on Google Images or Flickr... Or even any staged photo you have or can take - showing enough resolution from a headshot that you can extract recognisable faces from eye reflections. I have a 12 megapixel camera in my phone - and I'm not convinced I could reliably take a photo of someone's face with enough resolution to pick to recognisable detail in a reflected face in an eyeball...
    - jesterjester 8y ago
      Resolution is limited.... to the camera that takes the photo. Yes. You won't get information from something that doesn't have information. Are you going to write a paper that 100 < 1000 ? I wouldn't, but I guess I'm some genius or something. You can't, because the information isn't there. The same way you can't read a book that is closed, even with a super computer.
      - posterboy 8y ago
        Wait a second, if it all relies on the camera, sure you can't read a book with your natural camera - your eyes - alone. But with xray for lead based ink for example, book scanning would be well awesome.
    - romwell 8y ago
      >I have a 12 megapixel camera in my phone I am sorry, but megapixels do not a good camera make. My Fuji X100 (35mm prime) and Nikon D200 (50mm prime), the latter from over a decade ago, both easily produce clear pictures in eye reflections when the light is good. That said -- have you actually tried? I just took a selfie with my MotoG5s front camera, and I can see a face from my FB feed reflected in my eye. And that's in crappy office lighting, from a screen with brightness turned down to minimize strain! >Or even any staged photo you have or can take To re-iterate: it is ridiculously easy to take such a photo with a real camera with decent lens. Modern cell phone cameras are capable as well if the light is good. Here's a non-attempt: just a crop from the selfie I took https://imgur.com/ax9Vz5B https://imgur.com/ax9Vz5B
  - kbenson 8y ago
    > I've never met someone who doesn't know that eyes are reflective. "Moon landing? Bleh, who cares. We know the moon is a planetoid and how far it is, why is it interesting when we land on it? I've never met anyone that didn't know it was possible to land on the moon."
    - romwell 8y ago
      Please go and read the paper. You seem to imply that the linked paper is something that it is not. The contents of the paper is pretty much contained in its title. They took photos and saw faces reflected in eyeballs! That's it! People have been doing that since, well, cameras were invented. And people have been staring into reflections in eyes since forever. "My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; Where can we find two better hemispheres, Without sharp north, without declining west?" -John Donne (1572-1631)
- romwell 8y ago
  >Everybody "knows" that scene from Blade Runner is "just science fiction". Well now it's not. It still is, that's not what the paper is about. The paper really seems to amount to "gee, eyes are reflective".
- lotyrin 8y ago
  I'm with him, though I maybe don't agree with the assumed tone about it. Precisely what surprising thing went from being assumed non-possible to known possible through these folks' efforts? This paper is pointing out that if you have sufficient fidelity, you can do this -- which isn't the science fiction part of the film plot, it was fundamental and now widely known (and frequently repeated in popular CSI type television and film, to the degree it has now spawned many parodies). What was science fiction in the film was that somewhere "beyond the year 2000" you'd have a source image of sufficient fidelity to try this with -- and the paper hasn't changed that either, it is quite unlikely you are going to find matching fidelity images (39 megapixel) out of e.g. security camera or child abuse stills anytime soon. The only novelty here is that the researchers have access to still camera that can take a photo of fidelity required to make this a real thing in their controlled conditions -- which is a little cool I suppose, but is that surprising? Things reflect light, and that kind of capability from imaging sensors is fairly established (yet still not widely available enough to produce real world applications). They lean on this abstract with these crime solving use cases -- and if those things were real (even if you cheated and used the very top of the line consumer video recorders or security cameras or phone still cameras) then sure yeah that'd be remarkable and maybe people would be surprised by that (precisely because it is not physically possible).
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - romwell 8y ago
    >that kind of capability from imaging sensors is fairly established (yet still not widely available enough to produce real world applications). It has been used in real-world applications for a while -- just not the dystopian kind we love talking about here. E.g. check out this photogprapher's work: https://petapixel.com/2015/11/27/a-wedding-photographed-through-the-eyes-of-guests/ https://petapixel.com/2015/11/27/a-wedding-photographed-thro...
motoboi 8y ago
I agree with you. But what I'm focusing here is that although the paper uses high resolution cameras to retrieve identifiable images, one can may now use super-resolution to retrieve the same images from normal cameras.
- jesterjester 8y ago
  One could always see through windows in a building. Do we write a proof for how to do it?
- lotyrin 8y ago
  Superresolution can only process information that's even there in the first place -- it might be trained and aware of faces enough to produce a face from very low resolution, but it won't be an accurate identifiable face, it'll be a machine's hallucination of a plausible face, and to even find yourself in that whole courtroom argument of "is this the accused or does the AI just dream that up" you'll need enough resolution in the first place that your entire reflected face isn't just a contributor of a single captured pixel -- enough only to guess at skin hue.
  - onion2k 8y ago
    If a system is able to identify a face with better-than-chance accuracy then it shifts things from "We have absolutely no evidence you were there so we have to believe your alibi." to "We have cause to believe you might have been there so we can doubt your alibi. " That's a long way from proof, but it could be enough to get a judge to issue a search warrant or persuade a jury that other evidence is true. This is not a good thing. Probability-based evidence such as DNA relies on people understanding probability, and most people really don't. If this system is used in the criminal justice system it will very likely lead to innocent people going to prison.

bigiain 8y ago

You're being incredibly disingenuous if you're suggesting this isn't a non-obvious and surprising finding for most people. Everybody "knows" that scene from Blade Runner is "just science fiction". Well now it's not.

jesterjester 8y ago
This is definitely not non-obvious. This is incredibly obvious. I've never met someone who doesn't know that eyes are reflective. >"Well now it's not." It never was. Being able to turn corners in a picture was the science fiction part, not the fact that those corners had people in them. Jesus how am I the only person here who understands this concept. It really isn't rocket science... the solution is solved by technology, not by progressive "methods" of using that technology.
- bigiain 8y ago
  Sure. Eyes are reflective. But resolution is limited. If you are so sure it's "obvious" you can extract recognisable faces from reflections on photographs containing eyes - show me you can do it using any photo containing a headshot you can find on Google Images or Flickr... Or even any staged photo you have or can take - showing enough resolution from a headshot that you can extract recognisable faces from eye reflections. I have a 12 megapixel camera in my phone - and I'm not convinced I could reliably take a photo of someone's face with enough resolution to pick to recognisable detail in a reflected face in an eyeball...
  - jesterjester 8y ago
    Resolution is limited.... to the camera that takes the photo. Yes. You won't get information from something that doesn't have information. Are you going to write a paper that 100 < 1000 ? I wouldn't, but I guess I'm some genius or something. You can't, because the information isn't there. The same way you can't read a book that is closed, even with a super computer.
    - posterboy 8y ago
      Wait a second, if it all relies on the camera, sure you can't read a book with your natural camera - your eyes - alone. But with xray for lead based ink for example, book scanning would be well awesome.
  - romwell 8y ago
    >I have a 12 megapixel camera in my phone I am sorry, but megapixels do not a good camera make. My Fuji X100 (35mm prime) and Nikon D200 (50mm prime), the latter from over a decade ago, both easily produce clear pictures in eye reflections when the light is good. That said -- have you actually tried? I just took a selfie with my MotoG5s front camera, and I can see a face from my FB feed reflected in my eye. And that's in crappy office lighting, from a screen with brightness turned down to minimize strain! >Or even any staged photo you have or can take To re-iterate: it is ridiculously easy to take such a photo with a real camera with decent lens. Modern cell phone cameras are capable as well if the light is good. Here's a non-attempt: just a crop from the selfie I took https://imgur.com/ax9Vz5B https://imgur.com/ax9Vz5B
- kbenson 8y ago
  > I've never met someone who doesn't know that eyes are reflective. "Moon landing? Bleh, who cares. We know the moon is a planetoid and how far it is, why is it interesting when we land on it? I've never met anyone that didn't know it was possible to land on the moon."
  - romwell 8y ago
    Please go and read the paper. You seem to imply that the linked paper is something that it is not. The contents of the paper is pretty much contained in its title. They took photos and saw faces reflected in eyeballs! That's it! People have been doing that since, well, cameras were invented. And people have been staring into reflections in eyes since forever. "My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; Where can we find two better hemispheres, Without sharp north, without declining west?" -John Donne (1572-1631)
romwell 8y ago
>Everybody "knows" that scene from Blade Runner is "just science fiction". Well now it's not. It still is, that's not what the paper is about. The paper really seems to amount to "gee, eyes are reflective".
lotyrin 8y ago
I'm with him, though I maybe don't agree with the assumed tone about it. Precisely what surprising thing went from being assumed non-possible to known possible through these folks' efforts? This paper is pointing out that if you have sufficient fidelity, you can do this -- which isn't the science fiction part of the film plot, it was fundamental and now widely known (and frequently repeated in popular CSI type television and film, to the degree it has now spawned many parodies). What was science fiction in the film was that somewhere "beyond the year 2000" you'd have a source image of sufficient fidelity to try this with -- and the paper hasn't changed that either, it is quite unlikely you are going to find matching fidelity images (39 megapixel) out of e.g. security camera or child abuse stills anytime soon. The only novelty here is that the researchers have access to still camera that can take a photo of fidelity required to make this a real thing in their controlled conditions -- which is a little cool I suppose, but is that surprising? Things reflect light, and that kind of capability from imaging sensors is fairly established (yet still not widely available enough to produce real world applications). They lean on this abstract with these crime solving use cases -- and if those things were real (even if you cheated and used the very top of the line consumer video recorders or security cameras or phone still cameras) then sure yeah that'd be remarkable and maybe people would be surprised by that (precisely because it is not physically possible).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- romwell 8y ago
  >that kind of capability from imaging sensors is fairly established (yet still not widely available enough to produce real world applications). It has been used in real-world applications for a while -- just not the dystopian kind we love talking about here. E.g. check out this photogprapher's work: https://petapixel.com/2015/11/27/a-wedding-photographed-through-the-eyes-of-guests/ https://petapixel.com/2015/11/27/a-wedding-photographed-thro...

motoboi 8y ago

I agree with you. But what I'm focusing here is that although the paper uses high resolution cameras to retrieve identifiable images, one can may now use super-resolution to retrieve the same images from normal cameras.

jesterjester 8y ago
One could always see through windows in a building. Do we write a proof for how to do it?
lotyrin 8y ago
Superresolution can only process information that's even there in the first place -- it might be trained and aware of faces enough to produce a face from very low resolution, but it won't be an accurate identifiable face, it'll be a machine's hallucination of a plausible face, and to even find yourself in that whole courtroom argument of "is this the accused or does the AI just dream that up" you'll need enough resolution in the first place that your entire reflected face isn't just a contributor of a single captured pixel -- enough only to guess at skin hue.
- onion2k 8y ago
  If a system is able to identify a face with better-than-chance accuracy then it shifts things from "We have absolutely no evidence you were there so we have to believe your alibi." to "We have cause to believe you might have been there so we can doubt your alibi. " That's a long way from proof, but it could be enough to get a judge to issue a search warrant or persuade a jury that other evidence is true. This is not a good thing. Probability-based evidence such as DNA relies on people understanding probability, and most people really don't. If this system is used in the criminal justice system it will very likely lead to innocent people going to prison.