Recognition

There's a problem with photographic police lineups – they typically only include front-on photos of suspects, which may not match the angle at which a witness saw the criminal. A new system, in which witnesses can rotate the images, has been shown to be more reliable.

​We've seen it in movies many times before … the reluctant witness who looks right at the mug shot of the murderer, and falsely claims that they don't know him. Soon, however, police could know if such people are lying – by watching their eyes.

Unless a video has already been geo-tagged, it can often be very difficult to tell where it was shot. Now, however, scientists have created algorithms that can determine a video's location by comparing its background imagery and audio to that of thousands of other videos.

A study just carried out by Dr. Rob Jenkins of the University of York and Christie Kerr of the University of Glasgow, both in the UK, has found that the picture of a high-end camera is capable of seeing images reflected from the corneas of a subject being photographed.

Computer scientist Lijun Lin is working on software that will allow computers to recognize the emotions of their users.