@Credit: Jenkins and Kerr, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0083325
Researchers Rob Jenkins at the University of York, UK, and Christie Kerr at the University of Glasgow, UK, have discovered that reflections in the eyes of photographed people can yield identifiable images of bystanders.
They used a Hasselblad H2D to capture high resolution 39-megapixel images. The resulting photographs are 5,400 x 7,200 pixels, with the subject’s iris containing about 54,000 pixels overall. By zooming in on the iris, the researchers extracted several rectangular sections containing the head and shoulders of reflected bystanders.
The whole face area for each bystander is about 322 pixels on average. Though the images are fuzzy, we are still able to identify faces with extremely poor image quality (as low as 7 x 10 pixels) as long as we are familiar with the faces.
In the future, the researchers hope to combine pairs of images recovered from both of the subject’s eyes to reconstruct a 3D representation of the environment from the subject’s viewpoint.
In practical terms, criminal investigators can analyze photographs of crime victims whose eyes may be reflecting their perpetrators.
“The future prospects are interesting,” Jenkins said. “The world is awash with digital images. Over 40 million photos per day are shared via Instagram alone. Meanwhile, the pixel count for digital cameras is doubling roughly every 12 months. So the future holds a lot of detailed images, which is potentially interesting for image analysts.”
Read the whole article at: physorg.
