Today, animation is often associated with movies and online businesses. On the other hand, caricatures are commonly intended to ridicule famous figures like actors and politicians. But that’s about to change.

Starting next year, animation and caricatures are set to become very important tools in fighting crimes in the UK.

According to the Lancashire Evening Post, a study by Dr Charlie Frowd, psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, shows caricaturing and animating photofits improve recognition rates from 40 to 80 percent. On the other hand, an ordinary photofit face was only recognized 20% of the time.

Photos of Brad Pitt and Tony Blair are used to better illustrate this project.

Turning a photofit to a caricature requires overstressing of some features of a human face like nose, forehead, or ears by as much as 50%.

“We found through our studies that different people need different levels of caricature to best recognise a face, so showing them an image as a series of caricatures - from caricature to anti-caricature - is the best way to improve recognition rates,” said Co-researcher Professor Peter Hancock, of the University of Stirling.

This software will be used initially by the Derbyshire Police.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Logo Design News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.