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What Are You Looking At?

Posted by michael on from the mirror-into-the-soul dept.

Ensign Stinky writes "The NYTimes has a story, with some spooky-cool pictures, about software to extract exactly what image a person is seeing with their eyes, just from the reflection on their cornea. You can see even a wider image than the subject and tell what they're specifically focusing on. It's too bad the coolest tech is immediately subverted for evil. The possible applications listed include 'surveillance cameras that spot suspicious behavior.' Remind anyone of that scene in the movie 'Wild Wild West' where they extract the last thing the dead guy saw?"

15 of 367 comments (clear)

  1. Here we go again... by jlgolson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why is surveillance cameras that spot suspicious behavior bad? It seems like it would be good, because the cameras will not be watching the vast majority of people walking by. Just the ones that are darting from person to person, or back and forth looking for cops.

    Also, why didn't the poster mention "use in interfaces for quadriplegics who use their gaze to operate a computer". Sounds like that is a lot more interesting to the Slashdot crowd than surveillance cameras.

    Sounds kinda nifty to me. As far as the surveillance part, they won't learn that much from me. Guys look at breasts a LOT. Wow. Newsflash.

    1. Re:Here we go again... by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Interesting

      So people like me, who are inherently paranoid, are at higher risk?

      Great...I knew this would happen. :)

      --
      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
    2. Re:Here we go again... by tsg · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Just the ones that are darting from person to person, or back and forth looking for cops.

      Or scanning the crowd looking for someone they're meeting. What, exactly, about "darting eyes" indicates criminal or suspicious behavior?

      Sounds kinda nifty to me. As far as the surveillance part, they won't learn that much from me. Guys look at breasts a LOT. Wow. Newsflash.

      They won't just know that guys look at breasts a lot. They will know whose breasts you were looking at. Big difference.

      --
      People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
    3. Re:Here we go again... by Minwee · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Our security cameras showed that you spent twenty six minutes and eighteen seconds staring directly at Ms. Jones' chest in the last month alone. I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go before she files a sexual harassment complaint with the board. Have a nice day."

    4. Re:Here we go again... by pz · · Score: 5, Informative

      IAAVR (I am a visual researcher) who professionally studies eye position. We use a number of methods to do this, but one of the easiest and quickest way to measure a person's eye position is to arrange an off-the-shelf video camera with telephoto lens to point at the subject's eye. Plenty of software then exists to extract the iris position and therefore the position of the eye in the orbit, and therefore the point in space where the user is looking. Naturally, a more expensive whiz-bang camera will give you better data, but with a run-of-the-mill consumer grade camera you can do better than 1 degree of accuracy. This sort of thing is already done for quadraplegics.

      How do you turn this into a high-resolution image of what the subject is looking at? You point a (better) camera in the opposite direction and either adjust it's position to match, or computationally select out the portion of the image where the subject is looking.

      Now, that isn't exactly what these researchers did, but it would be a whole lot easier (and it's what we do on a daily basis).

      And, for those who don't have a photography habit, many of the current-issue SLRs (Canons, specifically) already read your eye position with some nifty technology that uses reflections of IR LEDs off your cornea and focuses the camera where you're looking in the frame. (If you haven't used a camera which does this, try it; you'll never go back.)

      The point? Technology to read eye position exists, and some of it is pretty old (eg, if you're willing to put a contact lens in your eye, then techniques from the 60s work fine). The ONLY interesting part these people did was to use the reflection off the front surface of the eye (which despite what another poster suggests is very high fidelity if captured with high-quality hardware) and applied the appropriate reflection model to undo the optical distortion of looking in the equivalent of a curved mirror. Think of it this way: if we all wore those mirrored sunglasses from the 70s, despite not having exact eye position information, just approximate gaze direction from head angle, we'd be able to tell more-or-less what each person was looking at.

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  3. Okay... by Agent+Green · · Score: 5, Funny

    So I need to wear my tinfoil hat AND dark sunglasses!

    --
    // Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
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  4. Forget the government... by Trigun · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is really going to get me in shit with the wife.

  5. Sexual Harrasment claims up by 500% by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    BEEP!

    Female worker: Stop looking at my breasts!

    Male worker: I wasn't!

    BEEP!

    Female worker: Argh! You did it again!

    BEEP!

    1. Re:Sexual Harrasment claims up by 500% by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


      I keep the sexual harrasment forms in the bottom drawer of my desk. That way when a woman goes to get one I can check out her ass.
      [rimshot]

      --
      Trolling is a art,
  6. Old technology by FerretFrottage · · Score: 5, Funny

    Women have been able to detect what men are looking at for centuries.

    (.)(.) ---> Hey you, read the comment above first

    --
    "Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
  7. Can help spot fakes by EnnTeeDee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Very cool! Seems like this might be used to help spot Photoshop modifications -- for example, in a group picture, just compare the reflections in each person's eyes.

  8. Hmmm by jdtanner · · Score: 5, Funny

    I can imagine it now...

    Spy1: What is he looking at?
    Spy2: Hang on...it's still processing...
    Spy1: Well?
    Spy2: He's looking at two guys wearing shades and dark coats operating a massive camera and computer!
    Spy1: Doh!

    John

  9. Looking through animal eyes by base_chakra · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Although the author of the article declares that "the system can automatically recover wide-angle views of what people are looking at" (emphasis mine), to me one of the most exciting potential applications is to further human understanding of what animals choose to look at.

    With our current knowledge of ocular biology we can make some assertions about what color ranges different species can see, but being able to study more precisely what they choose to focus on and what conditions attract their attention would advance our understanding of other species tremendously.

  10. Re:Exactly by symbolic · · Score: 5, Insightful


    There is no way you can tell what the person is mentally processing by virtue of the fact that a particular image happened to be reflected in their eye. All you can reasonably conclude is that they were facing in a particular direction. What if, for example, someone was merely staring into space, with their thoughts wandering between and betwixt something completely unrelated? Isn't that what we call daydreaming? What rational conclusion could you you possibly draw in a situation like this, and how could you refute someone's claim to the contrary?