Monday 14 December 2009

Tattoo me...

On the news this morning - the potential use of infra-red digital photography to capture images of tattoos which might be useful in capturing villans.

There's a handy BBC article (Camera filter reveals tattoo clue) as a starting point and an article in the Derby Telegraph. That led me to the press release on the University of Derby's site:
"Identifying individuals using tattoos has been an established part of forensic science practice for some time, but there can be cover-ups of tattoos with lasers, more tattoos or surgery."

It is now possible to take a control photograph and a separate photograph with an infra-red filter to take images of the tattoo, and determine if it is indeed the original or is a cover-up, or altered tattoo on the surface.

Digital photography means that moments after the images have been taken, they can be viewed on a laptop or computer screen - making this interesting approach now more feasible for use in everyday forensic work, compared to more traditional processes."

David Bryson, quoted from link above
From there I got to the Forensic sciences faculty pages at Derby. Now I wonder if this has any other potentially useful ICT sorts of applications you might be able to use? I'm thinking we can get CSI, Spooks andWaking the Dead into this newsletter you know...

Then I got to David Bryson's bio on the Derby website and from there to his own site called Cladonia Resources which might possibly have something vaguely useful on it. It was quite interesting following the path to get there though... . A prize to the first person who can tell me (withoug using google) who or what Cladonia is. My money's on Mr Heald...

Ooh, really obscure cultural reference in the title to this post btw...

4 comments:

jane said...

is it a moss?

Blue Square Thing said...

Ah, bet you had to look it up though :-)

Unknown said...

nope although i dont come across as bright i do know things lol

Blue Square Thing said...

Don't be harsh on yourself! It's the sort of stuff I wouldn't expect anyone to ow really, unless they were a biologist really into mosses I spose :-)