Composite Face Sketches.

I never really understood how anyone could identify someone off of those police sketches!
Now it seems that some psychologists have come to the same conclusion - but not pulling reasons out of their rear ends...like me!

In an article appearing in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, the authors point to several studies that indicate facial composite systems produce a poor likeness of the intended face. For instance, studies in which individuals attempt to create composites of celebrities have yielded extremely poor results. In one particular study, only 2.8 percent of participants correctly named a well-known celebrity that had been created by other participants using the face-composite software. In a separate study, participants were unable to discriminate composites of their classmates from composites of students at entirely different schools.

According to authors, these poor results are not deficiencies in the software per se but instead a mismatch between how we remember faces and how composites are produced. "Numerous lines of evidence converge on the view that faces are generally processed, stored and retrieved at a holistic level rather than at the level of individual facial features." Ultimately the psychological process of remembering faces may include more complex representations such as multidimensional similarity to other faces or relative sizes and distances of features and so on that are not readily retrieved by memory nor utilized by facial composite software.

Check out the Eureka Alert article.

I also ran across this sweet sweet compositing web interface.
Make sure you check out the guy I made "joe joe mcjoe joe" He's hella sexy!