15 ms·

Reflected hidden faces in photographs revealed in pupil

138 points by ca98am79 13y ago

japhyr 13y ago
Wow! I had no idea this could be done. The implications of this technique for forensics work are intriguing. Is this a new idea, or have people been working on this for a while?
- walid 13y ago
  Well it is in many crime movies except that our megapixels were not enough for such uses. Now with high resolution images it is relatively easier to do. I'm not surprised by it. It just is another use of tech.
- jkubicek 13y ago
  The idea of examining a subject's pupil has been around for years. I've used a similar technique to reverse engineer lighting setups for portraits. See my friend Mike's portrait of one of his children: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oatmeal2000/8545400550/sizes/o/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/oatmeal2000/8545400550/sizes/o/ You can clearly see that he uses one umbrella to the right of the camera. With higher resolution images and better focus you can sometimes determine the brand of lighting they use, but that's only if it has a very distinctive shape.
- GrantS 13y ago
  This 2004 paper got a lot of attention in the computer vision community doing essentially the same thing about a decade ago: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/world_eye/ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/world_eye/ "The World in an Eye," K. Nishino and S.K. Nayar, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Vol.I, pp.444-451, Jun, 2004.
  - apu 13y ago
    There was a related paper on using the eyes as a means of capturing a full environment map which could be used directly for relighting a scene (e.g., for 3d rendered scenes or for compositing digital objects into scenes): http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/eyes_relight/ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/eyes_relight/
edent 13y ago
The cameras used have 39 megapixels. I wonder how well it works with Nokia's PureView cameras - or the lower quality lenses on iPhones & Androids?
jbrooksuk 13y ago
I always thought that CSI was having a laugh with scenes like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53ilsuJOTG8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53ilsuJOTG8
- renekooi 13y ago
  Well, there is a tiny bit of a difference in image detail between CCTV and the 39 MP camera used here. So CSI has no excuses still.
  - krapp 13y ago
    Maybe the whole CSI franchise is secretly near-future science fiction?
- thejosh 13y ago
  Heh, or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp77AjBdlEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp77AjBdlEc.
  - jbrooksuk 13y ago
    Haha! "Uncrop" amazing! I should really watch Red Dwarf.
    - dmd 13y ago
      In a photograph pasted into a Word document and then cropped within it, you often can uncrop, because the crop is non-destructive.
      - jbrooksuk 13y ago
        Did you watch the video? He uncropped a picture which had been printed as a cropped photo.
        fullsailor 13y ago
InclinedPlane 13y ago
In maybe 20 years or so this sort of shit is going to be scary. Imagine what happens when we have several orders of magnitude more computing power available. A lot of things aren't possible today because they are too computationally intensive, but computing power is just getting cheaper and more abundant. Imagine what happens when it's feasible to process basically all data on the entire internet. Every photo and video. Every tweet, vine, and wall post. Every porn video and macro image. It'll be possible to find the identity of anyone in any picture. Moreover, every picture or video that someone has been in will be easy to correlate. Now scale that up to every activity. Anyone with enough computing power will basically be able to create a dossier on anyone, or on everyone. The implications are concerning.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  There are hard limits in terms of energy/thermal efficiency to computation. I don't think you will be able to process all the information on the internet - even assuming that people use ridiculously high resolution images regularly.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Consider that all of the video on the internet has been processed multiple times already, in order to encode it and decode it upon viewing. The hardware to do so is incredibly distributed though, but nevertheless that hardware has already been manufactured and put to use. The current youtube infrastructure already processes encoding/uploading video at more than 6,000x real-time. With significantly more powerful computers it will be possible to use a similar investment in hardware to not just encode but also analyze and correlate video at thousands of times real-time. What becomes possible 10, 20, or 50 years into the future? If you can analyze video at, say, 10,000x real-time you can crunch a billion hours of video in a decade. Imagine the value of the meta-data you could get from such an analysis. You would have incredibly fine-grained details on people's lives, especially as video use becomes more common. Being able to see hidden details in reflections is immaterial compared to what will be possible. With enough computational resources it'll be possible to create dossiers on everyone everywhere. You'd know where they live, who their friends are, what they do for fun, what they own, what they wear, what they read. Using writing analysis you could find out how politically active they are, what their opinions are, and so on. Given that abundant individual liberty is still a fairly rare, and constantly endangered, condition on Earth it's frightening to imagine tools that could give such information in the hands of unscrupulous folks.
jere 13y ago
>In addition, “in accordance with Hendy’s Law (a derivative of Moore’s Law), pixel count per dollar for digital cameras has been doubling approximately every twelve months. This trajectory implies that mobile phones could soon carry >39 megapixel cameras routinely.” Ah Moore's Law. It explains everything. Double every twelve months, eh? Hmm, quick math. Facebook has been around for 9 years... oh yea, that explains why Facebook allows you to upload full resolution 60MP photos. /s >What do your Instagram and Facebook photos reveal? Nothing. They're about 100 times too small for this technique. And they probably always will be.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  > And they probably always will be. Famous last words when predicting non-advance of technology.
  - jere 13y ago
    Yup, you're right. I'm lacking imagination. Please help me understand a future where social networking sites will maintain and display ~ 6200px X 6200px photos of your selfies. Outside of genetically engineering new eyeballs, I'm struggling here.
    - Jakob 13y ago
      Higher DPI displays for life-size photos?
      - err4nt 13y ago
        Okay I'll do the math, if we look at a chart we can find that most human heads fit within the measurements of 6.5 inches wide, and 9.4 inches tall [1]. That fits nicely within the 8x10 inch standard size for photographs that is common, so assuming we display these images at the maximum resolution human eyes can discern [2](somewhere <300 pixels per square inch) that means that in order for you to display a human head life-sized at 'visually flawless' resolution only requires an image with a resolution of 2400x3000 pixels. I can see the appeal of life-sized photos on social networking sites in the future. Group photos could benefit from being larger than that to include multiple people at life-size, but I'm unsure of how a resolution greater than 2400x3000 would be useful for a profile picture at this point. [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/HeadAnthropometry.JPG http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/HeadAnthr... [2] http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina-display/ http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina...
krapp 13y ago
And now i'm wondering whether you could create an app which detected faces reflected in images and scrambled them... though with eyes that might destroy the way the original face looks in some creepy way. Of course you'd have to strip all the EXIF data as well including any internal thumbnails which would be of terrible quality anyway...
pg 13y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0
- pvnick 13y ago
  Combine with content aware fill and you get http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3NWKbBaaU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3NWKbBaaU
RokStdy 13y ago
Am I the only one who thought, "so what?", after reading this? A picture of sufficient detail taken under optimal conditions can yield reflected images off of the pupil. Big deal. It has always been the case that in a high resolution image you had more of a chance to see reflected images. Not that this isn't interesting, but their hypothetical (hostage situation) would have been a much more intriguing test case. But, since those pictures/videos are rarely taken with super high resolution cameras with good lighting, it's unlikely this technique would be helpful. Edit: Just to be clear, I think anything new in the form of research and development is generally good. Maybe this work will be built upon to create something great. I just don't like the implied promise that pieces like this make. It oversells what technology can actually do and is, I think, misleading.
a_olt 13y ago
This work is not entirely new. Here is another recent article, where it is explained how input to a smartphone/tablet can be reconstructed by analysing reflections of the screen in various nearby surfaces, or the user's pupil. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2516709 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2516709
- devindotcom 13y ago
  How cool. Careful, though, Neal Stephenson is probably lurking here collecting items like this for his next book.
ojbyrne 13y ago
As someone who has taken a lot of pictures, the key to photography is not pixels, but light. And so I had to read the paper: "The room was flash illuminated by two Bowens DX1000 lamps with dish reflectors, positioned side by side approximately 80 cm behind the camera, and directed upwards to exclude catch light" Yes, that's the kind of lighting conditions that are routinely present at crime scenes.
- vacri 13y ago
  Then there are what seems to be the standard-issue security cameras, where it's hard to even tell what the main subject is wearing.
im3w1l 13y ago
EXIF-data is a much more realistic threat. EDIT: Oh and camera-charecterising noise signatures.
- aeturnum 13y ago
  Do you have any resources on fingerprinting cameras based on noise? Seems hard to do outside a controlled environment (as noise is so heavily influenced by environmental factors).
shmageggy 13y ago
That picture of Obama is 18x25, not 16x20.
- ecocentrik 13y ago
  and the reflection is off the cornea not the pupil but who's paying attention to details...
jbattle 13y ago
I expect big things in the coming decades coming out of computer vision & image processing. I wouldn't be surprised if algorithms to 'zoom & enhance' images reach the levels we laugh about in movies today. I'm not well read on the topic so I might be talking out of my ear, but this is the sort of thing I'm anticipating getting more and more powerful over time: http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~milanfar/talks/milanfar.pdf http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~milanfar/talks/milanfar.pdf (jump to page 23 if you want to see demos of the algorithm) http://www.scriptol.com/programming/graphic-algorithms.php http://www.scriptol.com/programming/graphic-algorithms.php edit: grammar
- kayoone 13y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if algorithms to 'zoom & enhance' images don't reach the levels we laugh about in movies today. wouldn't or would ? don't or do ?
- kaoD 13y ago
  Noise and lack of resolution are different beasts. That paper has nothing to do with "zoom & enhance", which will never reach the level we see in movies, since the information is just not there.
  - jbattle 13y ago
    Yet both noise-reduction and resolution-enhancement are both fundamentally about taking whatever information you do have and using that to interpolate/infer information that has been lost (or was never captured). Especially in certain domains such as written letters (e.g. license plates) or faces that have a well-known structure with variations in known dimensions, I wouldn't be surprised to see algorithms that can probabilistically infer what information would have originally been there. Of course you'd never reconstruct an entire face from a single pixel, but how far can we go? I dunno - but my hunch is pretty far
    - thirdsight 13y ago
      And of course if we look at recent history we see where that technique goes terribly wrong (Xerox document archival compression).
pasbesoin 13y ago
Shades of "Blade Runner". And, I'm now waiting for someone to release a "Privacy Eye" Photoshop filter (a la the ubiquitous "red eye" filter).
oakwhiz 13y ago
This works on things like Christmas ornaments as well...
dhughes 13y ago
> Although Jenkins did the study with a high-resolution (39 megapixels) Hasselblad camera,... Medium format cameras have a much greater area sensor and probably overall better quality ($2,000 vs $20,000 or even $50,000 medium format camera) compared to a regular digital DSLR camera. Even a quick Google seemed to indicate photographers prefer the larger sensor size even if it has fewer pixels. The article mentions "face images retrieved from eye reflections need not be of high quality in order to be identifiable" but even so there must be a massive difference in picture quality compared to a Hasselblad medium format camera sensor. Still interesting though it's as if the goofy CSI or Blade Runner "Enhance!" has come true.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
PavlovsCat 13y ago
> It would be interesting to see what hidden information is buried in law-enforcement (and other) photo archives — some of which could even help exculpate innocent persons. Yeah, it would be interesting. But would you hold your breath for it? In an age where kids "shoot themselves" while being handcuffed and whatnot, I for one wouldn't.
evanb 13y ago
This reminds me of dual photography [1], in which you trade many projectors and one camera for one projector and many cameras using time reversal symmetry. The video [2] gives a good explanation, and the revelation of the playing card is what strikes me as similar to revealing reflected hidden faces. [1] http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5_tpq5ejFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5_tpq5ejFQ
jrockway 13y ago
This is a long-time favorite effect of anime studios: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReflectiveEyes http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReflectiveEyes
- renownedmedia 13y ago
  It's especially effective when the dreamy music is cued and the light colors get all blurry
siler 13y ago
Wouldn't it be interesting if we were able to capture so much information in a photograph that you could examine the pupils of the people that appear in pupils, etc.?
aaron695 13y ago
Given the Internet has millions/billions of photos on it yet the authors chose not to do a simple random sample, at all, I'm guessing this is more setting up everything exactly correct to create the answer they want. This is not how one normally does science.
Houshalter 13y ago
The hard part would be identifying the person in the photo, if you didn't already have a list of suspects. Facial recognition isn't that great, but perhaps we could make only partially automated (i.e. the human points out where the nose is and stuff like that.) Then use some kind of bayesian probability to narrow it down (20% of the population has this facial feature, calculating the probability distribution of different faces/facial features producing the image being analyzed, etc.)
DougN7 13y ago
This is hardly new. I've been looking at the background of people's reflected pupils in posters (think of the big posters at hair salons and stores) for many years.
crystaln 13y ago
Remember when they called it "exponential growth" instead of "a derivative of Moore’s Law"?
Brajeshwar 13y ago
[Video] Let's Enhance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk

138 points by ca98am79 13y ago

Wow! I had no idea this could be done. The implications of this technique for forensics work are intriguing. Is this a new idea, or have people been working on this for a while?

walid 13y ago
Well it is in many crime movies except that our megapixels were not enough for such uses. Now with high resolution images it is relatively easier to do. I'm not surprised by it. It just is another use of tech.
jkubicek 13y ago
The idea of examining a subject's pupil has been around for years. I've used a similar technique to reverse engineer lighting setups for portraits. See my friend Mike's portrait of one of his children: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oatmeal2000/8545400550/sizes/o/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/oatmeal2000/8545400550/sizes/o/ You can clearly see that he uses one umbrella to the right of the camera. With higher resolution images and better focus you can sometimes determine the brand of lighting they use, but that's only if it has a very distinctive shape.
GrantS 13y ago
This 2004 paper got a lot of attention in the computer vision community doing essentially the same thing about a decade ago: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/world_eye/ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/world_eye/ "The World in an Eye," K. Nishino and S.K. Nayar, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Vol.I, pp.444-451, Jun, 2004.
- apu 13y ago
  There was a related paper on using the eyes as a means of capturing a full environment map which could be used directly for relighting a scene (e.g., for 3d rendered scenes or for compositing digital objects into scenes): http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/eyes_relight/ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/eyes_relight/

edent 13y ago

The cameras used have 39 megapixels. I wonder how well it works with Nokia's PureView cameras - or the lower quality lenses on iPhones & Androids?

jbrooksuk 13y ago

I always thought that CSI was having a laugh with scenes like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53ilsuJOTG8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53ilsuJOTG8

renekooi 13y ago
Well, there is a tiny bit of a difference in image detail between CCTV and the 39 MP camera used here. So CSI has no excuses still.
- krapp 13y ago
  Maybe the whole CSI franchise is secretly near-future science fiction?
thejosh 13y ago
Heh, or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp77AjBdlEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp77AjBdlEc.
- jbrooksuk 13y ago
  Haha! "Uncrop" amazing! I should really watch Red Dwarf.
  - dmd 13y ago
    In a photograph pasted into a Word document and then cropped within it, you often can uncrop, because the crop is non-destructive.
    - jbrooksuk 13y ago
      Did you watch the video? He uncropped a picture which had been printed as a cropped photo.
      - fullsailor 13y ago

InclinedPlane 13y ago

In maybe 20 years or so this sort of shit is going to be scary. Imagine what happens when we have several orders of magnitude more computing power available. A lot of things aren't possible today because they are too computationally intensive, but computing power is just getting cheaper and more abundant. Imagine what happens when it's feasible to process basically all data on the entire internet. Every photo and video. Every tweet, vine, and wall post. Every porn video and macro image. It'll be possible to find the identity of anyone in any picture. Moreover, every picture or video that someone has been in will be easy to correlate. Now scale that up to every activity. Anyone with enough computing power will basically be able to create a dossier on anyone, or on everyone. The implications are concerning.

6d0debc071 13y ago
There are hard limits in terms of energy/thermal efficiency to computation. I don't think you will be able to process all the information on the internet - even assuming that people use ridiculously high resolution images regularly.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Consider that all of the video on the internet has been processed multiple times already, in order to encode it and decode it upon viewing. The hardware to do so is incredibly distributed though, but nevertheless that hardware has already been manufactured and put to use. The current youtube infrastructure already processes encoding/uploading video at more than 6,000x real-time. With significantly more powerful computers it will be possible to use a similar investment in hardware to not just encode but also analyze and correlate video at thousands of times real-time. What becomes possible 10, 20, or 50 years into the future? If you can analyze video at, say, 10,000x real-time you can crunch a billion hours of video in a decade. Imagine the value of the meta-data you could get from such an analysis. You would have incredibly fine-grained details on people's lives, especially as video use becomes more common. Being able to see hidden details in reflections is immaterial compared to what will be possible. With enough computational resources it'll be possible to create dossiers on everyone everywhere. You'd know where they live, who their friends are, what they do for fun, what they own, what they wear, what they read. Using writing analysis you could find out how politically active they are, what their opinions are, and so on. Given that abundant individual liberty is still a fairly rare, and constantly endangered, condition on Earth it's frightening to imagine tools that could give such information in the hands of unscrupulous folks.

jere 13y ago

>In addition, “in accordance with Hendy’s Law (a derivative of Moore’s Law), pixel count per dollar for digital cameras has been doubling approximately every twelve months. This trajectory implies that mobile phones could soon carry >39 megapixel cameras routinely.” Ah Moore's Law. It explains everything. Double every twelve months, eh? Hmm, quick math. Facebook has been around for 9 years... oh yea, that explains why Facebook allows you to upload full resolution 60MP photos. /s >What do your Instagram and Facebook photos reveal? Nothing. They're about 100 times too small for this technique. And they probably always will be.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
> And they probably always will be. Famous last words when predicting non-advance of technology.
- jere 13y ago
  Yup, you're right. I'm lacking imagination. Please help me understand a future where social networking sites will maintain and display ~ 6200px X 6200px photos of your selfies. Outside of genetically engineering new eyeballs, I'm struggling here.
  - Jakob 13y ago
    Higher DPI displays for life-size photos?
    - err4nt 13y ago
      Okay I'll do the math, if we look at a chart we can find that most human heads fit within the measurements of 6.5 inches wide, and 9.4 inches tall [1]. That fits nicely within the 8x10 inch standard size for photographs that is common, so assuming we display these images at the maximum resolution human eyes can discern [2](somewhere <300 pixels per square inch) that means that in order for you to display a human head life-sized at 'visually flawless' resolution only requires an image with a resolution of 2400x3000 pixels. I can see the appeal of life-sized photos on social networking sites in the future. Group photos could benefit from being larger than that to include multiple people at life-size, but I'm unsure of how a resolution greater than 2400x3000 would be useful for a profile picture at this point. [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/HeadAnthropometry.JPG http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/HeadAnthr... [2] http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina-display/ http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina...

krapp 13y ago

And now i'm wondering whether you could create an app which detected faces reflected in images and scrambled them... though with eyes that might destroy the way the original face looks in some creepy way. Of course you'd have to strip all the EXIF data as well including any internal thumbnails which would be of terrible quality anyway...

pg 13y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0

pvnick 13y ago
Combine with content aware fill and you get http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3NWKbBaaU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3NWKbBaaU

RokStdy 13y ago

Am I the only one who thought, "so what?", after reading this? A picture of sufficient detail taken under optimal conditions can yield reflected images off of the pupil. Big deal. It has always been the case that in a high resolution image you had more of a chance to see reflected images. Not that this isn't interesting, but their hypothetical (hostage situation) would have been a much more intriguing test case. But, since those pictures/videos are rarely taken with super high resolution cameras with good lighting, it's unlikely this technique would be helpful. Edit: Just to be clear, I think anything new in the form of research and development is generally good. Maybe this work will be built upon to create something great. I just don't like the implied promise that pieces like this make. It oversells what technology can actually do and is, I think, misleading.

a_olt 13y ago

This work is not entirely new. Here is another recent article, where it is explained how input to a smartphone/tablet can be reconstructed by analysing reflections of the screen in various nearby surfaces, or the user's pupil. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2516709 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2516709

devindotcom 13y ago
How cool. Careful, though, Neal Stephenson is probably lurking here collecting items like this for his next book.

ojbyrne 13y ago

As someone who has taken a lot of pictures, the key to photography is not pixels, but light. And so I had to read the paper: "The room was flash illuminated by two Bowens DX1000 lamps with dish reflectors, positioned side by side approximately 80 cm behind the camera, and directed upwards to exclude catch light" Yes, that's the kind of lighting conditions that are routinely present at crime scenes.

vacri 13y ago
Then there are what seems to be the standard-issue security cameras, where it's hard to even tell what the main subject is wearing.

im3w1l 13y ago

EXIF-data is a much more realistic threat. EDIT: Oh and camera-charecterising noise signatures.

aeturnum 13y ago
Do you have any resources on fingerprinting cameras based on noise? Seems hard to do outside a controlled environment (as noise is so heavily influenced by environmental factors).

shmageggy 13y ago

That picture of Obama is 18x25, not 16x20.

ecocentrik 13y ago
and the reflection is off the cornea not the pupil but who's paying attention to details...

jbattle 13y ago

I expect big things in the coming decades coming out of computer vision & image processing. I wouldn't be surprised if algorithms to 'zoom & enhance' images reach the levels we laugh about in movies today. I'm not well read on the topic so I might be talking out of my ear, but this is the sort of thing I'm anticipating getting more and more powerful over time: http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~milanfar/talks/milanfar.pdf http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~milanfar/talks/milanfar.pdf (jump to page 23 if you want to see demos of the algorithm) http://www.scriptol.com/programming/graphic-algorithms.php http://www.scriptol.com/programming/graphic-algorithms.php edit: grammar

kayoone 13y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if algorithms to 'zoom & enhance' images don't reach the levels we laugh about in movies today. wouldn't or would ? don't or do ?
kaoD 13y ago
Noise and lack of resolution are different beasts. That paper has nothing to do with "zoom & enhance", which will never reach the level we see in movies, since the information is just not there.
- jbattle 13y ago
  Yet both noise-reduction and resolution-enhancement are both fundamentally about taking whatever information you do have and using that to interpolate/infer information that has been lost (or was never captured). Especially in certain domains such as written letters (e.g. license plates) or faces that have a well-known structure with variations in known dimensions, I wouldn't be surprised to see algorithms that can probabilistically infer what information would have originally been there. Of course you'd never reconstruct an entire face from a single pixel, but how far can we go? I dunno - but my hunch is pretty far
  - thirdsight 13y ago
    And of course if we look at recent history we see where that technique goes terribly wrong (Xerox document archival compression).

pasbesoin 13y ago

Shades of "Blade Runner". And, I'm now waiting for someone to release a "Privacy Eye" Photoshop filter (a la the ubiquitous "red eye" filter).

oakwhiz 13y ago

This works on things like Christmas ornaments as well...

dhughes 13y ago

> Although Jenkins did the study with a high-resolution (39 megapixels) Hasselblad camera,... Medium format cameras have a much greater area sensor and probably overall better quality ($2,000 vs $20,000 or even $50,000 medium format camera) compared to a regular digital DSLR camera. Even a quick Google seemed to indicate photographers prefer the larger sensor size even if it has fewer pixels. The article mentions "face images retrieved from eye reflections need not be of high quality in order to be identifiable" but even so there must be a massive difference in picture quality compared to a Hasselblad medium format camera sensor. Still interesting though it's as if the goofy CSI or Blade Runner "Enhance!" has come true.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

PavlovsCat 13y ago

> It would be interesting to see what hidden information is buried in law-enforcement (and other) photo archives — some of which could even help exculpate innocent persons. Yeah, it would be interesting. But would you hold your breath for it? In an age where kids "shoot themselves" while being handcuffed and whatnot, I for one wouldn't.

evanb 13y ago

This reminds me of dual photography [1], in which you trade many projectors and one camera for one projector and many cameras using time reversal symmetry. The video [2] gives a good explanation, and the revelation of the playing card is what strikes me as similar to revealing reflected hidden faces. [1] http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5_tpq5ejFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5_tpq5ejFQ

jrockway 13y ago

This is a long-time favorite effect of anime studios: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReflectiveEyes http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReflectiveEyes

renownedmedia 13y ago
It's especially effective when the dreamy music is cued and the light colors get all blurry

siler 13y ago

Wouldn't it be interesting if we were able to capture so much information in a photograph that you could examine the pupils of the people that appear in pupils, etc.?

aaron695 13y ago

Given the Internet has millions/billions of photos on it yet the authors chose not to do a simple random sample, at all, I'm guessing this is more setting up everything exactly correct to create the answer they want. This is not how one normally does science.

Houshalter 13y ago

The hard part would be identifying the person in the photo, if you didn't already have a list of suspects. Facial recognition isn't that great, but perhaps we could make only partially automated (i.e. the human points out where the nose is and stuff like that.) Then use some kind of bayesian probability to narrow it down (20% of the population has this facial feature, calculating the probability distribution of different faces/facial features producing the image being analyzed, etc.)

DougN7 13y ago

This is hardly new. I've been looking at the background of people's reflected pupils in posters (think of the big posters at hair salons and stores) for many years.

crystaln 13y ago

Remember when they called it "exponential growth" instead of "a derivative of Moore’s Law"?

Brajeshwar 13y ago

[Video] Let's Enhance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk