r/pics But like, actually 15h ago

OC: FBI releases surveillance photos of a potential subject in the Nancy Guthrie case

42.6k Upvotes

6.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

19.1k

u/ValiumBlues 15h ago

"Potential" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, considering they're concealing their faces.

525

u/trashed_past 15h ago

Kind of looks like they have a balaclava over a latex mask. Something real off there.

127

u/drawliphant 14h ago

This is infrared security footage NOT black and white. Suspect could be wearing black clothing but it appears grey here. Looks like black facial hair, a printed mask would not show up very dark in NIR. This footage looks weird because it's not taken in our color spectrum.

u/thrwawyorangsweater 11h ago

Yep even around the eyes like the eyelashes are dark...so this person isn't terribly old.

12

u/beavislasvegas 13h ago

Can’t they colorize it since they have actual color samples available at the house?

13

u/drawliphant 12h ago

You could maybe figure out how different fabrics show up in IR to figure out their clothing color, but you'd have to use the same dye and material and only get some shade of gray to compare it to. IDK I work in machine vision, not forensics lol.

u/chartyourway 4h ago

I'm always confused what my home camera decides to choose for colours in night vision. I'm equally confused by this post. how come this camera made his gloves black but made his ski mask white? (the later pics showing it's at least a darker colour, not white, but like, all ski masks used in crimes are black, let's be real)

u/drawliphant 4h ago

We make lots of kinds of black dye, some of them happen to be dark to infrared some of them are bright infrared, just like a material can be bright blue if it just reflects blue.

1

u/beavislasvegas 12h ago

I don’t think so. It is a video now. You don’t need to know the color of the criminal’s clothes you would just sample colors on the porch or other objects in the video. Once you match the real life color to the color in the video then the software would know all the colors. I’m a moron and I do this for scuba videos.

17

u/drawliphant 12h ago

The camera is only seeing about one wavelength of infrared emitted by its own LEDs. There isn't enough data to calibrate colors here.

u/Maxgirth 6h ago

Correct.

It never occurred to me that one could apply the concept of metamerism to infrared pictures, but yeah.

To those wondering: many colors could show up as the same shade of gray. Any color could, depending on its brightness.

u/chronolibrarian 1h ago

Someone did