Identifiable Images of Bystanders Extracted from Corneal Reflections (Extract)

By zooming in on high-resolution passport-style photographs, we were able to recover images of bystanders from reflections in the eyes of photographic subjects. Performance in the face matching task (Experiment 1) and the spontaneous recognition task (Experiment 2) indicate that these bystander images were not merely informative about facial appearance, they were properly identifiable to viewers who knew the faces. This is perhaps a surprising result, given the very unpromising source of these images. However, it is consistent with previous evidence that familiar face recognition is extremely tolerant of poor image quality[16].