Enhance! Photo analysis finds faces reflected in eyeballs

Devin Coldewey. NBC News Dec 27th, 2013 (http://www.nbcnews.com)

It’s the stuff of sci-fi, or at least of “CSI”: British researchers have demonstrated a technique whereby faces reflected in a person’s eye can be extracted from a picture. Zoom in far enough, it turns out, and that twinkle in your eye turns into a full-blown portrait.

Movie buffs may remember something like this appearing in the 1982 sci-fi classic “Blade Runner,” in which a photo is “enhanced” to an unreasonable degree — and of course many a cop drama or mystery has relied on such photographic tricks as well to produce evidence. But this time it’s for real.

Psychologists Rob Jenkins, of the University of York, and Christie Kerr, of the University of Glasgow, show that in the proper conditions, reflections off the pupil of the eye can contain enough details to identify faces. Potential applications aren’t far off from the fictional representations: A picture of a victim might hide details of the attacker or surroundings.

Full article and pictures at the source>