

New software could have ID’d Boston bomber - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/hallucinating-a-face-new-software-could-have-idd-boston-bomber/

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Zimahl
The title is a little over-reaching.

The software could've given a clearer image of a suspect which would've aided
police in finding said suspect. Figuring out who actually placed the bomb in
the first place was bottleneck #1 and probably took the bulk of the time.
Bottleneck #2 is finding out who that person is and this is made easier with
the crowd-sourcing that is local news. Bottleneck #3 is physically finding the
person which they even had trouble doing with Boston on lockdown.

It's a neat solution to a very real problem, so technically very cool just not
what the article is billing it as.

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tantalor
If the super resolution software worked, then you don't release the
information to the media and you skip step 2.

That's important because the suspect will most likely flee once they realize
you have their image.

Instead you develop leads and set up surveillance.

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fiatmoney
Meaningless unless you know the false positive rate. A technology with a 1%
false positive rate over the US population gives you a Minneapolis of people
to investigate.

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tantalor
You only seed it with persons of interest.

They don't want to identify every random person, just persons of interest,
wherever they go.

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na85
I'd rather live in a world where terrorist attacks happen occasionally than in
the movie Minority Report.

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jfoutz
Too bad. If it's any consolation, there will still be terrorist attacks.

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denzil_correa
Anil Jain from Michigan State University (one of the highest ranked h-index in
Computer Science) recently published a technical report on the this subject
[0]. The technical reports says that they were able to identify Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev with a Rank-1 hit against a 1M mugshot background database.

[0]
[http://www.cse.msu.edu/rgroups/biometrics/Publications/Face/...](http://www.cse.msu.edu/rgroups/biometrics/Publications/Face/KlontzJain_CaseStudyUnconstrainedFacialRecognition_BostonMarathonBombimgSuspects.pdf)

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desigooner
Except the Rank-1 hit wasn't against an image from the mugshot database.

 _..The notable rank-one hit for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an illustrative example
of this potential. However, the hit was against a graduation photograph with
similar pose that was tweeted after he had been publically identiﬁed, and not
a conventional mugshot from a prior arrest._

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tantalor
Yes but Tsarnaev's brother was known to authorities. It's feasible for
authorities to index his photo and known family members.

If they had put _both_ faces into the search, and matched both with high
confidence, the result would have sent up a huge flag because the known
relationship.

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jonahx
This stuff is really cool, and really frightening. The genie is already out of
the bottle.

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bsenftner
Super-resolution is the future of a lot of image processing technologies.

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sp332
This isn't like most super-resolution techniques, that take multiple images
and align them to a higher-resolution grid.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-
resolution#Geometrical_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-
resolution#Geometrical_or_image-processing_superresolution) This is about
having a model of what a face _should_ look like, and fitting the data to it.
It's like taking a handful of data points and plotting a curve, then
interpolating/extrapolating other data points. Except instead of something
simple like a bell curve, the model is of a human face! (That means you could
feed it random data and it would still come up with a face - grotesquely
distorted perhaps, but the model can _only_ make faces.)

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pronoiac
Machine pareidolia!

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/unavoidablegrain/sets/721576288...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/unavoidablegrain/sets/72157628855014523/)

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altrego99
Obligatory :) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU>

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brianmorris10
Looks nothing like the actual image.

