#newmethodinforensic

[forensicfield]

Combining multiple CCTV images could help catch suspects

Psychologists from the universities of Lincoln and York, both in the UK, and the University of New South Wales in Australia created a series of pictures using a ‘face averaging’ technique – a method which digitally combines multiple images into a single enhanced image, removing variants such as head angles or lighting so that only features that indicate the identity of the person remain. They compared how effectively humans and computer facial recognition systems could identify people from high quality images, pixelated images, and face averages. The results showed that both people and computer systems were better at identifying a face when viewing an average image that combined multiple pixelated images, compared to the original poor-quality images. Computer systems benefited from averaging together multiple images that were already high in quality, and in some cases reached 100 per cent accurate face recognition.