Slashdot Mirror
CSI Style Zoom Sees Faces Reflected In Subjects' Eyes
mikejuk writes "A recent paper by Dr Rob Jenkins of the Department of Psychology at York University (UK) has managed to prove that you can get useful images of faces from the reflections in eyes. It really is as simple as zooming in. The catch is that the experiments were done with a 39 mega pixel camera — even so the actual final images were low resolution. In the experiment a number of people were photographed with a 'bystander' in a position so that a reflection of their face would be captured in the eye. The resulting extracted image of the reflection in the eye was only 27x36 and then rescaled using bicubic interpolation to 400x240 or bigger and enhanced using standard PhotoShop operations to normalize the contrast and brightness. Test subjects were able to match faces using the low resolution images but the important result was that if the subject knew the person in the photo then recognition went up to 90% with false positives down at 10%. So the next time you appear in a photo consider the fact that a simple procedure might reveal who you are with."
Coming to NSA-approved monitoring sites like Facebook: automatic detection of people you are with, even if they're not "in' the photograph!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Gratuitous enhance!
So we should be giving really high res cameras to pedophiles. That way the photos they take will have more than fear in the eyes of their victims.
I picked up a Sony A7R in november and noticed that I could clearly see myself in the eyes of every person I photographed. At 36 mega pixels, consumer cameras like the A7R (and that nikon whos name I can't remember) are more than capable of the CSI effect.
i may or may not be the only witness later?
count of the cameras you are snapping pics with. I can only think of a couple of cameras that get 39 megapixels, and they are in the Pureview line of Nokia's products. Even those don't produce 39 megapixel images, they use a sampling method to make better images at ~9 megapixel final resolution.
The beta version of slashdot is awful. Is there anyway to avoid it. I'm getting redirected to beta.slashdot.org every time I reload the website.
As a photographer, I have to clean up the eyes and all the other reflective materials from my images, if any, or find myself in sweet spots where it doesn't happens.
It's also common knowledge that you can actually learn about the photographer's lighting setup and materials by looking at the shadows AND light reflection in the eyes.
There are also nice non-shopped photographies with that reflectiveness property being applied to produce interesting results, with inverted sceneries being shown in the eyes. Take the picture close enough and you won't have 50 pixels, but 500 of reflection. Take it with a high resolution camera and you'll get 1000-2000 pixels worth of goodness.
So there's a direct correlation between a pixel count and the number of pixels for a detail.
In other words, it's known that you get good reflectivity in eyes and it's known that using high resolution cameras you can get good details from eyes, inferring you can tell who's on the other side. Well ... yep. Next thing they'll figure out is by having a high sensitivity camera you can get cleaner pixels of the people themselves in the reflectivity, as the lighting is seldom as adequate and the contrast is much less prevalent in these reflections, so by having much cleaner 32 native bits per color, you could technically have a "perfect" rendition of the user, especially at high F
Surprise me next time :) I'd even say that if you could have a consistent reflective model of a person's anatomy and a map of its clothings, you could potentially infer a person's surroundings, as every material is slightly reflective / refractive too. But we're really not there yet. :)
The key factor is that the test subject has to know the face in the low resolution image. It seems that we are very good at identifying a known face and not so good at matching a low res image to a set of possible hi-resolution photos including the face.
Hm, add this to the list of things which will be presented as infallible by some tech huckster, but which doesn't really do anything useful at all.
It's like an identity parade in which you just show a photo of the suspect and ask, "So, it was him, then?"
which would otherwise be a curiosity? beware falling gargoyles? ever get that feeling..?.? like if we used stem cells our 'healthcare' would come of age? imagine being the pr lackey (just a (low) #) of some murderous cabalistst? spiritual suicide? never a better time to consider ourselves in relation to momkind our spiritual centerpeace sync with (an invisible beardless) creation. no wonder the hymenless monkeys pity us?
Corporal Littlebottom will have words with you, son.
A recent paper by Dr Rob Jenkins of the Department of Psychology at York University (UK) has managed to prove that you can get useful images of faces from the reflections in eyes.
Didn't anyone think this couldn't be done?
Are you sure he doesn't work in the Department of Bleedin' Obvious?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
CSI did it first
These guys at Columbia did something similar years ago, but used eyeball reflections and a cornea model to figure out what the person was looking at: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/world_eye/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIHNiR3CP8
link
What the sensationalized headline fails to recognize is that this technique will only work if you have a high-res image, taken with a high-quality lens capable of resolving pixel-level detail, with a shutter speed fast enough to effectively freeze the subject, and proper incident light to get a usable reflection.
Where this won't work:
Security cams (low res, crappy lenses, low shutter speed)
Cell Phones (even the new Nokias simply don't have a sharp enough lens to make this useful)
Inexperienced photographers not using flash (hand shake will render eye detail unusable, even in "sharp" photos")
Dark or out of focus images
It's completely obvious that one can extract more information from a detailed image. But this study's conclusions simply fall - again - into the trap of thinking that MP = detail.
Anybody with a recent DSLR can test that this can be done. I recently took a portrait if myself in my cat's eye.
The trick to this though is that you need a DSLR with fairly high resolution, a good sharp lens, and have the photo be a closeup of the subject. None of which are features of the vast majority of security camera footage.
If somebody was willing to spend amounts in the range of $1000 per camera, yes, this might be a possibility. Provided the person stared right into the camera while standing at a meter or so from it.
Also, it'll probably stay this way. There are limitations to the useful resolution that can be achieved, so it's not possible to simply put a 1000 MP sensor into a security camera and suddenly be able to perform the tricks shown in CSI.
I am trying to figure out the newsworthy part in this - it's been known for ages that you can get details out of reflxions and high-def images...
For the practical implications - we're not going to get any benefit from users' twitpics, blog images and fb photos, as those are rarely ever uploaded in full high-def+highest-quality, 41MP camera notwithstanding: I'd like to see
Yes, it is possible to get data out of reflections on small shiny objects (and I suspect forensics teams have been on top of this ever since cameras reached consumers), but the lighting conditions and capture mechanisms have to be set up perfectly.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
I've seen Blade Runner too
So the next time you appear in a photo consider the fact that a simple procedure might reveal who you are with."
Uhh, whoever I was with? You mean whoever took the photo? You mean whoever posted the photo? wtf?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
... the technology to convert unfocussed VGA resolution photographs and convert them into focused 39 megapixel photographs. That is why this technique is so useful on CSI.
With enough megapixels you could capture the persons's face from the eyes of the captured face from the person's eyes
The only novel thing, and by far the spookiest, about this "research" is that it's coming from a "Department of Psychology".
As for the ramifications, it'll be a long time before North Korea's press officers get much overtime on the back of it. I doubt it'll be of interest even to domestic security services. However cheap and widespread hi-res cameras become, 90% reliability is woefully low. They can get much better than that already, just with a board and a bucket.
I can get xrays off peoples eye reflections.
I'm already so more future they can't even imagine.
So, if I know who I'm looking for I can find them in a blurry, low-res picture?
How can anyone be expected to recognize anyone they don't know?
Wouldn't the reflection in a subject's eye be of the picture taker with their camera in front of their face?
Ken
How long until the much-maligned faceback app in 'The Other Guys' becomes real?
Ken
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp77AjBdlEc
(based on Blade Runner of course, which did it first)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I get much better images using car or mirror reflections
Thank you for bringing up such quality content. You know, 39 megapixel pictures are only usable if you have high end glass on your camera, which only rich camera enthusiasts can afford. That excludes forever smartphone cameras (yeah, even those whatever megapixels Nokias), security cameras, small digital cameras, which would actually render useless 99% of all cameras on earth for that usage. So you only need to have one of these rich guys take a picture of a crime scene, yeah, only that...
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Mmmm. I'd forgot how quickly Red Dwarf jumped the shark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIHNiR3CP8
"...but the important result was that if the subject knew the person in the photo then recognition went up to 90%"
So it's just like the photos of the guy with the stolen Debit card at the ATM.
Just their mother would recognize them on those images.
Not that zooming wasn't known and done even earlier, but Blade Runner did the zoom enhance bit long before CSI. CSI simply overused it until they reached Ludicrous Speed.
First a promoted story telling us how impressive it is that NASA has spent millions of dollars proving that light travels happily through space, and now a brain-dead clod discovers that reflective things, well, "reflect".
And yet, given the constant political propaganda that the owners of Slashdot promote here, isn't it interesting that in the midst of the massive 'full surveillance' scandal afflicting Obama, Obama ordered that the next space launch of a massive NSA spy satellite had a gigantic "F*ck You, you worthless American sheeple" on the side of the rocket, in the form of a Cthulu -like octopus devouring the world, with Obama's words "nothing is beyond our reach".
Why did the owners of Slashdot specifically prevent this astonishing story from being promoted here. Because THAT is how stupid they think you are. Fit to be told that reflective things reflect. Fit to be told that light travels well through a vacuum. But NOT fit to be told that Obama's full surveillance programs are a top priority of the US government, and growing daily in scope and budget, with maximum aggression against people that Bill Gates describes as "useless eaters".
So is it true a dead person's retina retains the image seen at the moment of death?
If you've only been exposed to cell phones and retail-level cameras you might think it's just a gimmick Nokia is using, but...you'd be wrong. The Nikon D800 DSLR is at 36; Hasselblad/Mamiya/Pentax/Leica medium-format bodies are anywhere from 50 to 80. Have been since 2006 or so. Give it another two generations on the DSLR front and you'll be getting a $499 50MP Nikon or Canon at Wal-Mart.
Anyway, even on my D5100@16MP I can pull recognizable images if it's a frame-filling portrait, anything more is just making it easier.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
That was no ordinary camera they used for this...
If you read the original paper (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0083325), buried in the detailsis the one where they used a Hasselblad H2D, which is a medium-format digital camera with an enormous 36.7mm x 49mm CCD.
This camera is about 7 years old (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/newsLetter/digi_photo_hassel-jun2006.jsp), so it might be possible to find it for cheaper on the secondary market. The current version, the H5D, also retails in the $30K range.
What makes these cameras special is not just the huge CCD, but also the incredibly precise (and multi thousand dollar) lenses.
A Lumia, or even a pretty nice DSLR in the single-digit thousands of dollars range won't pull in detail like this camera does. If with the amount of megapixels that lower end cameras claim to have, their sensors are too small and paired with inferior optics compared to what was used for this paper.
I need to start working on those goatse contact lenses!
Medium format film runs into 100s of "megapixels" (i.e. up to 10x the resolution of the digital camera they used) and large format even higher.
you had me at #!
Now the question is: can we engineer the thing and create a fake? We can even imagine a post-processing filter in cameras to remove face from eyes in the picture. We already remove red eyes.
Everytime i came across a stories like this one, I remember a story here on Slashdot a long time ago, maybe in another time-space continuum, before 2001, maybe in 1999, about someone optical searcher in MIT who can create very HD images from staking multiple lowres image from a movie camera. This software was open source and I try it with y own images from small sony handycam with great result. I try to find reference to this software and research without any succes since. and I obvioulsy don't have the sftware anymore. Pretty sure is on NSA desk now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIHNiR3CP8
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Six seasons of brilliance followed by a hiatus and a lame reboot that never should have been is a decent run for any series.
...the subject is looking at a picture..?