These two pictures are of the same man. Or then again, they might not be. Can you be sure? How confident are you that you know the answer? The pictures were taken at different times, so be careful not to rely on superficial things like clothes or hairstyle.
The problem of how to identify people from video tape is increasingly important. Very many businesses have security cameras which capture poor quality images of the sort shown above on the left. If suspects are arrested it is then important to be able to match these with high quality images of the type shown on the right.
Early experiments show that people are very bad at this task. Even when shown pictures simultaneously, it seems that we are unable to compensate for the differences in angle, lighting and quality of images like these. However, if the viewer is personally familiar with the target, then the task is surprisingly easy, even with images as poor as these.
This is a joint project between Glasgow and Stirling Universities, and is funded by the ESRC (1997 to 1999). We will be investigating ways in which human performance can be improved in this task, and also how automatic face recognition systems can be used in the face of such degraded data.