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Interpol Unscrambles Doctored Photo In Manhunt
jackpot777 writes in with an AP story out of Paris reporting that Interpol has distributed photos of a man suspected of sexually exploiting children. The images were recovered from pictures taken off the Internet in which the man's face had been blurred using something like Photoshop's Filter > Distort > Twirl tool. German police were able to recover recognizable images of the man, whose identity and nationality are not known. Interpol would not discuss the techniques used to recover the images. jackpot777 writes: "It does show one interesting facet of internet privacy that has also been noted with topics ranging from reading blurred check numbers in images to Google's plan to blur out license plate and face data for Street View. And that is: blurring is not the same as completely obscuring. As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features."
The pictures can be seen on Interpol's site.
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Amazing, indeed
My 0.02 cents
From the interpol web page it says:
These pictures have been produced by specialists from Germany's federal police force, the Bundeskriminalamt, working from originals found on the Internet, which had been digitally altered to disguise the man's face.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
.. can be read here.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
Surely Interpol's top-secret image-unblurring technology is just a matter of applying the Twirl effect in the opposite direction at the same location, and perhaps applying some image-enhancement plug-ins to the resulting area? I doubt it's anything one couldn't do with off-the-shelf software.
A twirl is essentially shifting pixels around an image, and is designed to keep as much information as possible.
A blur on the other hand, especially a gaussian blur, will mix pixels together in such a way that any recovered image will be one of many possible outcomes.
Then again, removing information, by pixellating for example, would be best.
.: Max Romantschuk
>Interpol would not discuss the techniques
I showed this to my PS using friend and he shurgged, said 'Just do a radial blur in the opposite direction' and 30 seconds later had a picture about 80-90% as good as the one they're waving about as being the result of some super secret methodology.
It does strike me as a bit stupid explaining it all - now crims will just use better techniques for blurring themselves out. The media, law enforcement agencies are doing this more and more and it's insane - "we just had an idea for a terrorist attack that might happen and here it is in full", "This is foresnic evidence that allowed us to catch the crim" and so on.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features.
Yes, or you could just stop molesting children and photographing it.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features.""
New laws were passed today, making it a felony to obscure, obfuscate, scramble, cover or otherwise purposely mask your identity by modifying a digital image for the purpose of avoiding identification by law enforcement agencies.
I wonder when I'll be able to buy the software that automatically unscrambles all the pixelated regions on my rather specific-content Japanese DVDs.
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If this were an episode of CSI They could have simply drag-and-dropped the photo into their "automatically un-distort face in image" program, then zoomed in over the man's shoulder to read the artist's signature of a painting behind him. Then recognizing that these paintings are only sold from one obscure store in New York City, they drag-and-drop the photo into their "compare to every frame of every NYC ATM to this picture" program and found a frame of him standing conveniently in front of his license plate, which they could also zoom in to read the registration sticker text.
Get with the times Interpol. Sheesh, CSI wouldn't even have had to use their "match a partial fingerprint I zoomed in 6000% to get off of a glass of water in a 72dpi jpeg to every known felon in the US in under 10 seconds during witty banter" program to solve this one!
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
It probably helps a LOT that in several of the images, there's a strong line visible in the background. Measure the twirl of that, you've got your benchmark right there. Center of the twirl is probably easy enough to locate too. So there's your twist, and where to apply it.
It's a good thing so many criminals are dumb. It's the smart ones that you have to worry more about.
"Interpol Unscrambles Doctored Photo In Manhunt"
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Who says he's dumb? If he carefully photoshopped someone else's face onto his, and then applied the easy-to-remove swirl, he now has the entire planet searching for the wrong guy....
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