Re: Cop Shows?

I think in one episode they had a photo of CP, and they got an image of the CP photographer from a reflection within the eye of the girl being filmed...

That is theoretically possible, already. It is only extremely difficult.

The eye is a fairly reflective surface, and because in photography, the models are looking at the camera, the reflective surface is pointed back at the shooting person or team.

However, other factors are at play. Lighting, in particular, could play with the reflection in several ways that would ruin the accuracy of any reflection on a person's eyes. It has to be very lucky lighting that gives a reflection that would be workable to identify a person or a setting. Natural light outdoors settings, in particular, are so well lit that reflections are rarely distinct enough. But even under semi-lit or indoors settings, not every reflection is good enough.

Another factor, and a very important one on digital photography, is the picture resolution. In a photograph where the whole person is shot, the eyes necessarily form only a small part of the picture, so only a small number of pixels is available to form the reflection. You and Bottle are right that this is a technological limit to photography forensics. Sure enough, the technology exists to increase, tenfold if need be, the size of any photography. Anti-aliasing softens the image enough for familiar shapes to sometimes appear on small areas. It's all, however, more and more at the expense of accuracy. You can make up a human shape, and you can probably, combined with the shot angle, guesstimate an approximate height and weight; it's a whole different thing to have a recognizable face, whose details are lost by the limited number of pixels in the original and which the anti-aliasing upon increasing make ever more indistinct from all other human faces. That is more science fiction than real policing.

Another factor they don't talk about is that dark eyes are better than clear eyes, for the same reasons that a window reflects when seen from the street and not when seen from inside. This would not matter more than the above factors, but it still matters. So, overall, getting an image from a reflection on eyes is something possible, only that it's so difficult it would be rare.

I think I know the episode you are talking about. Not a bad one, actually. It's the one with Sarah Paxton (of later "Aquamarine" fame). Although as I remember it they got a reflection of the room in which the shot was taken, not of the photographer.

I actually think a lot of the stuff on these shows was just created to scare people and make them "think" before they act. It just gives them the "Big Brother" effect that they're always being watched.

The Bentham-Foucault Hypothesis? Could be. Nice theory.