Can we ID from CCTV: image quality in digital CCTV and face identification performance

CCTV is used for an increasing number of purposes, and the new generation of digital systems can be tailored to serve a wide range of security requirements. However, configuration decisions are often made without considering specific task requirements, e.g. the video quality needed for reliable person identification. Our study investigated the relationship between video quality and the ability of untrained viewers to identify faces from digital CCTV images. The task required 80 participants to identify 64 faces belonging to 4 different ethnicities. Participants compared face images taken from a high quality photographs and low quality CCTV stills, which were recorded at 4 different video quality bit rates (32, 52, 72 and 92 Kbps). We found that the number of correct identifications decreased by 12 (~18%) as MPEG-4 quality decreased from 92 to 32 Kbps, and by 4 (~6%) as Wavelet video quality decreased from 92 to 32 Kbps. To achieve reliable and effective face identification, we recommend that MPEG-4 CCTV systems should be used over Wavelet, and video quality should not be lowered below 52 Kbps during video compression. We discuss the practical implications of these results for security, and contribute a contextual methodology for assessing CCTV video quality.