Our memories are notoriously unreliable, and subject to outside influence. I want to see how this would hold up in controlled experiments. Simple experiment: have a person briefly appear in a room full of students. Run each student through this process. Quantify how close the produced images were to the person's actual face.<p>If the faces are more fleshed out but not accurate, then that's just as bad as having a generic likeness.<p>There's an academic paper on the work (George et al., EFIT-V: Interactive Evolutionary Strategy for the Construction of Photo-Realistic Facial Composites, Genetic And Evolutionary Computation Conference 2009, <a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1389095.1389384" rel="nofollow">http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1389095.1389384</a>), but it only mentions using the software as a trial with police departments. There's too many variables there to give me confidence in the results.
If I were a clever defence lawyer I'd argue it would invalidate any later line-ups. This sounds like a stellar way to destroy a memory of a face.<p>Each time you show a person a face, you're adding new memory trace that will conflict with the real one. This will reduce the confidence in a later recognition task. You're also re-activating the real trace, allowing it to be disrupted. This would increase the false-positive rate in a line-up.
A possible (somewhat sci-fi) future extension to this idea would be directly monitoring the brain of the subject, in conjunction with eye movements, in an attempt to quickly detect a subconscious signal of 'recognition' while scanning the computer-generated faces. Might be that certain signals in the brainwave (e.g. the P300 or something similar: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_%28neuroscience%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_%28neuroscience%29</a> ) could be used for this purpose.
I bet that a web application built from this would be enormously popular.<p>It would also be useful as a way to create and share an online avatar likeness.