Face Recognition in Poor-Quality Video: Evidence From Security Surveillance

TLDR

Security surveillance systems often produce poor‑quality video, which can hinder forensic evidence collection. The study examined how well subjects could identify target people in poor‑quality surveillance video and investigated the influence of familiarity on recognition performance. The authors used a commercial video security device to present clips of targets, then edited the footage to obscure the head, body, or gait. Results showed that familiar subjects identified targets accurately, while unfamiliar subjects and police officers performed poorly, and that obscuring the head dramatically reduced recognition, indicating that faces drive identification in poor‑quality video.

Abstract

Security surveillance systems often produce poor-quality video, and this may be problematic in gathering forensic evidence. We examined the ability of subjects to identify target people captured by a commercially available video security device. In Experiment 1, subjects personally familiar with the targets performed very well at identifying them, but subjects unfamiliar with the targets performed very poorly. Police officers with experience in forensic identification performed as poorly as other subjects unfamiliar with the targets. In Experiment 2, we asked how familiar subjects can perform so well. Using the same video device, we edited clips to obscure the head, body, or gait of the targets. Obscuring body or gait produced a small decrement in recognition performance. Obscuring the targets' heads had a dramatic effect on subjects' ability to recognize the targets. These results imply that subjects recognized the targets' faces, even in these poor-quality images.