SECURITY cameras would be more effective at fighting crime if they recorded in colour.
Till now, researchers thought that colour doesn’t help people to recognise faces. But Pawan Sinha and Andrew Yip at MIT suspected that this applies only to high-resolution images that already contain enough information for people to identify faces easily.
In research to be published in the journal Perception (vol 31, p 995), they show that with lower-resolution or blurred images, colour significantly improves our ability to recognise faces. This could be particularly useful when dealing with poor-quality CCTV footage, says Sinha.
