The recent advances in digital photography, including the level of detail available, can be effectively used in forensics to catch criminals, a new study led by a University of York psychologist said.
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Images of people retrieved from cameras seized as evidence during criminal investigations may be used to piece together networks of associates or to link individuals to particular locations.
As the most commonly photographed objects are faces, there is potential in mining detailed facial images for hidden information.
Until now, photographers might reasonably have assumed that their own face was absent from the image. But the research, led by Dr Rob Jenkins overturns this assumption.
By zooming in on high-resolution passport-style photographs, Dr Jenkins and co-researcher, Christie Kerr, of the School of Psychology, University of Glasgow were able to recover the faces of bystanders from reflections in the eyes of photographic subjects.
To establish whether these bystanders could be identified from the reflection images, the researchers presented them as stimuli in a face-matching task.
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The study has been published in PLOS ONE.
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