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ACLU Examines Face-Recognition System
nate_drake and others wrote in about an ACLU report on face-recognition (PDF) (see also their press release and an MSNBC article). We've posted several previous stories about the Tampa police using face-recognition systems at the Super Bowl and on the streets of Ybor City.
... so the police abandoned it after not catching anyone with it.
all this means is the companies developing this stuff will have to improve their face-matching algorithm and then we'll all be back at square one.
given the demand for this stuff a la Sept 11, i dont think the companies will have a problem with motivation
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
So really, how well can this work? Half the porple I know look completely diferent from day to day anyway . . .
But take this for an example:
Soon after Sept 11th one of my colegues flew east on a buisness assignment. He was concerned because, as he said "Did I forget to mention, I look like one of those terrorists?"
He did, a little. Darker complextion, goatee, curlly hair, glasses. He looked more than a little like one of the suspects.
He's sinced shaved his goatee, so he no longer looks like that . . . but would this system have been abel to diferentiate?
I also seem to remeber that one of the guys they arested and incarcerated in Tampa turned out to be the wrong guy . . . .
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
After they take these digenerate pieces of sh*t down they need to go after the 'lie detectors'.
Soon we will have a camera on the market which is *AS* reliable as a polygraph test. 25% of the time they are wrong.
All of these things are a Bad Thing. These cameras will be used next to track you at the game [like the Bears? get calls at dinner about season ticket prices], at the bar [you like to go to bar!], at the strip club [the cops watch you now because they know you're a perv!]...
Just wait till this stuff goes all private!
Reminds me of Demolition Man
Get your Unix fortune now!
From the pressrelease:
. And in response to the ACLU's queries about the small number of system logs, the department has acknowledged that the software -- originally deployed last June, 2001 -- has not been actively used since August.
It goes on to later mention "redistricting" as a reason for it not being used. What does changing police distrcits have to do wit hthis technology, anyway? Does that mean they stopped using patrol cars too? And police dogs?
The real reason: It just didn't work. At least not well enough to justify all the problems associated with its use.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
Hang on, thats my face they are capturing, imaging, processing and then storing. Clearly I own broadcast rights to my own face and all of its characteristics.
If they match my face then they've reverse engineered my face into another format to circumvent its current storage mechanism.
Totally silly application of DMCA... but then again its a pretty silly bill.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
- The system has never correctly identified a single face in its database of suspects, let alone resulted in any arrests.
- The system made many false positives, including such errors as confusing what were to a human easily identifiable male and female images.
- The photographic database contains a broader selection of the population than just criminals wanted by the police, including such people as those who might have "valuable intelligence" for the police, or who have criminal records.
I wonder why they didn't mention that man who was a demo face for the system, and was subsequently misidentified then questioned as a felon. Guess it didn't make the logs.I should try to trademark my face and demand royalties...
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
It's like every other anti-anti device. Copy protection on software most hurts the legitimate users. Facial recognition invades the privacy of upstanding citizens more than any perceived benefit to crime fighting. It is casting the widest possible net while knowing full well that criminals are aware of you and will subvert your attempts to control them.
I used to park my bike in the garage beneath my work. The bike rack was about 3 meters from the attendent, and covered by a video camera. I had a cheap lock, but Ithought I was safe.
One day, I came to the rack to find my lock cut and my bike stolen. The attendant refused to talk to the police. But that's OK, I had the perpertrator on camera.
After getting the tape from the building security people, I took it to a camera shop. We sped through it to find the point where, sure enough,m you could see a guy walk up, try on my bike helmut, and ride off with the bike. Due to position, you could not see him cut the lock.
I say him because I am pretty sure that it was a male. That was all I could tell from the poor quality of the tape. I could not tell skin color, clothes, hair color, or enough facial features to recognize.
I don't think the best AI added to this image would have been able to do anything as far a facial recognition.
I wouldn't want to be the attenandt working that booth. After they find his mangled corpse (ala Fargo) the police will tell his widow, "Sorry Ma'am, all we can say for certain is that they were in some sort of automiblie. We think a sedan, but we don't know for sure."
Facial recognition is going to be even harder than this. As a programmer, you have two choices , go with an algorithm or try to use a neural network.
Most of the weaknesses in the algorthim approach are what the ACLU document was complaining about.
A neural network may work if you are looking for a specific person. The problem is that to identify two things as being different, they need to be as orthoganl as possible. To separate the sea of faces into two groups those we are loking for , and those we aren't based on a series of images is going to be nigh unto imposible. Certainly not with the amout of computing power per camera that they would put into it.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
As I understood it, the issue with facial recognition was the possibility of false positives; ie, I'm just trying to watch the SuperBowl. the FR system tags me as a known terrorist (incorrectly :) and the next thing I know I'm being dragged off to the can for some serious interregation (and not only unjustly tramatized, but I miss the game too)
But from the ACLU's press release, there was always a human step in the process, where a real live human being would examine each purported match before anybody got dragged off anywhere.
As such, all the face recognition software is is a _filter_, cutting down on the number of people a human agent must examine. Where's the problem?
After all, law enforcement officers have placed themselves in public places, looking for people they knew, for probably as long as there have been law enforcement officers.
A friend of mine was a sergent in the British Army, and he did a few tours in Northern Ireland. Part of his training was memorizing the faces of a large number of known IRA "players" (and apparently the IRA did the same thing with British soldiers' faces)
How is this any different?
I guess I don't understand the ACLU's beef here.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
"Osama's been spotted. Take him out, over."
"I guess he didn't stay in that cave very long, over."
-G
At what point, when the technology is capable of functioning better than this one has, do we say enough is enough? When do we shut down the system that says you are guilty until proven innocent? In the US we have been falsely raised to believe innocent until proven guilty is the prevailing law. Well, no more. Since 9-11 we have been hearing more and more about tracking individuals with this or that new gadget. As far as I am concerned this would be fine if you were not talking about American citizens. You want to track foreign nationals when they come into our country to make sure they are here doing as they said they would when then crossed our border. Fine. Since when did we decide that Big Brother was ok? I don't know, but I don't like it. We are never going back to the days when we moved about as freely as we once did, but do we have to give up every ounce of freedom for security's sake?
... First you're gonna say it, then you're gonna do it" -Bill Cosby
"Clean underwear? Why?!?
If Darwin was right, you'd be dead by now.
The local police in Virginia Beach want to install this to monitor the ocean front area. They are so gung ho about it that they are willing to fight city hall on this issue. The mayor and the local city council have both said that they do not like the idea and the police chiefs reply was that they were going ahead with it anyways.
The reason that I point this out is that I have to wonder what is going on behind the scenes. We have a technology that is unproven at best and most likely unworkable. Yet we see police chiefs risking their jobs to get it installed. Is it the kick backs or something more sinister? Probably kick backs but I would really like to know for sure.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
if( face.has_hat == TRUE && face.hat == TURBAN)
{
face.is_terrorist = TRUE;
police.arrest(face.parent);
police.beat(face.parent);
police.eatDonuts();
}
Other bad things have happened as well. One time, a drunk urinated all over me and the wire rack full of toys next to me. LaWanda, the night shift clerk, was asleep, and the crook went unpunished.
Face recognition systems could stop drunks and punk-rock kids from defacing convenience stores (and ATMs) with their shenanegins.
I am a sentient ATM.
Not to sound like a troll - This is a legitimate question.
Why do we allow the local convienience store to film us, yet we seem to have a problem with our government doing the same thing? Is it the database of faces that scares us? What if K-Mart used facial recognition to associate our purchases with our face. Would it be wrong for them to have televisions throughout the store interactively suggest purchases?
Don't get me wrong, I like retaining my rights,
but in this case, I feel that the rights of law enforcement agencies are being restricted.
The ACLU attacks face recognition when it is used to find criminals among the general public. (In other words, the system flags an individual as "suspect" if their face is found in a database of images).
I think a much better use would be in an access-control situation-- flag someone as suspicious if their face is NOT in the database.
It isn't too difficult to socially engineer your way into a building if you don't work there. But if employees were required to look at a camera for a split second before passing by the security desk, it would be much easier to identify those who don't belong (especially in large companies).
No, I don't think face recognition is accurate enough yet, but there are legit and non-privacy-invading uses for this technology.
Clearly this is just annother attempt of the US Government to take the rights away from its citizens. It won't be long before you'll have to give a DNA sample as you enter into a sports arena, and then into common places, such as a supermarket or brothel. This so called "war on terrorism" is nothing but a front to allow the US to catch up on it's plans to take away the rights of everyone, except the homeless. Yes, that's right, Orwell was right. They're working toward creating 1984. The FBI and CIA and probably a hundred others that we don't even know exist are sitting there watching us. Yes, they're even going to start "suggesting" what we should name our children. Oh, not overtly, just by planting nanoprobes into mothers as they give them "painkillers". I'm amazed that no one has come to stop me as I expose the truth!
If the system has failed to catch a single criminal, why on earth are taxpayers funding a failure? The company should give the technology away until it is proven.
The ACLU's statement of fact, that face recognition doesn't work, is interesting and useful. It means that more work is necessary for this to be a functional technology.
But I'm not sure how that leads to their conclusion, "the technology does not deliver security benefits sufficient to justify the Orwellian dangers that they present." If the stuff doesn't work, then it doesn't present any dangers.
At least, not any more dangers than the police officer standing out there looking for people. I'm not sure that the ACLU would grant police that right, actually, since it is a violation of what they seem to consider an absolute right of privacy.
In my opinion, a society will always make exchanges of some about of liberty for security. For example, I don't have the liberty to shoot people. The boundaries will always be contentious, but it seems to be as if this sort of absolutism does not comprise a reasonable discussion of where the boundaries are most appropriately set.
All the ACLU wants to do is discredit the technology, not actually find out if it works. Therefore, they're going to adjust their "findings" to suit their benefit.
Just because the technology failed in their "one month study" doesn't mean it's not a success. How many criminals could be walking down the street of NYC right now without anyone even noticing them? I'm sure there are plenty! Even if you have the person's face plastered on every telephone post, could you with 100% accuracy point your finger and say "THAT IS THE GUY IN THE PHOTO!". I know I couldn't. How many times have people misidentified criminals... seeing someone and saying it looked like someone else... then when the police did looked into the suspect, found he or she was not guilty? This happens all the time. So to say that the technology is flawed because it picked up innocent people is just dumb.
The other point made was that was made in the MSNBC article was that the system failed to point out someone with a 15 degree variance in the image they had compared to the person being compared... or if the lighting situtation was different. Unless you know someone and you see them daily, can YOU tell a person by their profile view when you only have picture of their face? No, you can't. If it was dark, could you tell? No.
Another point, that the system was gender bias... well, I know several people who could go either way sexually... and if you were to look at someone with long hair and lipstick, wouldn't you consider them female? All the guys who pick up drag queens accidently in NYC everyday surely couldn't tell the difference between male and female!
ACLU is making lame points and has no real evidence. Then again, I haven't seen any university studies or other non-biased studies on this situation. The ACLU claims Tampa police have abandoned the technology, which seems to be an all out lie. It's all a bunch of bullshit, and that single item is the proof.
If we are forced to live with Face Recognition Systems, we should require the person operating the camera system to have their photo and their personal information presented next to the camera. They shouldn't have anything to hide, should they? They have my data, why shouldn't I have theirs...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
This facial recognition has a near-zero Hit rate and a high false-positive (Type III error???) rate. The false-positive rate is a killer because it may cause system operators to miss a Hit (true positive). So what do we end up with: an authoritarian tool that is completely worthless.
Meanwhile, the failure of this project can be a selling point for Larry Ellison's proposed National ID card system. Perhaps the streetlamp cameras in Ybor City will soon be replaced by turnstiles manned by undereducated, undermotivated, understimulated, minimum-wage-earning Security Engineers (read: displaced airport security screeners) checking each person's National ID card. These people probably won't be able to grasp the concept of Type II/III errors; thus the implementation of the National ID Card will suffer from the same problems as the facial recognition system.
In summary the two vendors will profit substantially from their products--which won't make the public any safer--and we will be eased into acceptance of the mercantilist authoritarian police state.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
You don't know about biggERING? I guess you never read Dr. Seuss' "The Lifted Lorax" as a kid. Biggering is what happens to EVERY government everything...and many corporations as well. See, they're not happy being the size they are..so they bigGER. If you have one employee working for you, now you want two. Then two becomes four and so on and son on and so on. This police chief is the perfect example. he wants a biGGER police department. More toys = more employees needed to install, run and maintain the toys. Now he can say: Hey, I now run a 100 person dept. (as opposed to a 40 person one five years ago) I need a BIG raise (after all, crime is mostly down everywhere so he surely needs a biGGER dept, now doesn't he?)! And on it goes. Read the Lorax. You'll understand.
For more on McDonald's over-hyping of the emperor's new security blanket, see this article from the Fresno Bee .
Sample quote: "This breakthrough technology makes us the safest airport in America," Mayor Alan Autry said.
Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
right on, man
Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
I logged onto slashdot this morning. Do I think face recognition is a bad thing? Well that depends on who has it....
A blind person that uses face recognition technology to "hear" who a person is, is cool.
A law enforcement agency using it to scan every person as they pass through a turnstile at an amusement park, not cool.
I saw a discovery channel special where london police used face recognition technology to pick off riot prone people out of a stadium. I didn't think that was cool at all.
...and I want to emphasize: "part".
To me this is just like predicting weather. All weather stations (SW & HW) out there do is "predict" the weather -- humans than jump in to validate the "prediction". To me, this system is no different.
Granted, it still needs a lot more work, but wasn't the first weather station in the same state when it was first introduce? Lets give this thing some time before killing it down.
ACLU is looking for a reason to discredit the system; they need to do a better job than spend two months reviewing one uint which used only 2 days a week
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Remember the good ol' days of th'Internet, where no one could possibly track you and where anonymity was technologically "guaranteed"
My point is, that arguing the TECHNICAL weaknesses of this, or any other privacy-infringing item/product/software/etc. will only result in TECHNICAL innovations that make it more effective.
We must argue the LEGAL weaknesses - the 4th amendment. We need to argue that no person waives their constitutional rights simply by the virtue of entering a commercial, travel, or other legal relationship with any other entity. (unfortunately, I fear we lost this one a long time ago)
We need to argue against clickwrap agreements, and their cousins:
Our legal rights are important. The details of whatever technology the FBI, CIA, or any other no - such - agency uses in an attempt to violate those rights, are less so.
Don't Frustrate their efforts. Fight them head - on!
With a little tweaking, I believe the commentary on this issue will be iterated in the same categories as cited here.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Then mod this post down, cowboy! It's a troll!
(Completely ignore the fact that this is posted by an AC at (score: 0), which is below the (score:1) default threashold, where no right-thinking slashdotter will ever see it. Why waste a mod point elevating a good post when you can use it to dump on a no-good-shit(tm)? )
Oops I Crapped My Pants is a great product for keeping me firmly planted in my cubicle at work. That's how I know about 'em, you turd wrangler.
The points you've listed are all the result of limited technology. Given time, each of these can be overcome.
There must be a broader argument against what face-recognition technology is trying to do -- keep the populace under surveillance.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
I heard they used a method of testing based on the same engine that actually powers the facial recognition system. Eleven out of twelve tests came back that the recognition system wasn't effective. The other one reported that the system was, in fact, a jelly dougnut.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
heh, it would just be fun to see how far people could twist the dmca until we finally got it repealed. ;)
;)
i wonder if we could attack the fingerprint database too since it would fall under the same category of reverse engineering your prints into another format and circumventing the current storage mechanism.
heh, then imagine if this lawsuit were a class action lawsuit. to claim shares of the payout, criminals would have to come and get them. (much like the classic tales of criminals being suckered out of hiding by letting them know they've won some sort of prize.)
The ACLU apparently isn't happy with the Idea, not the technology. They are using the primitive technology that is currently in place to discredit the "Idea" the Idea is superb. IF we can have monitoring stations around that can succesfully detect wanted criminals it would be very useful and an extremley powerful aide against crime. The technology doesn't store the faces anywhere, unless you're a criminal. The ACLU bitches b ecause our freedom and privacy is at risk. What Privacy? You're in a public area, an area which is under patrol by cops. If you do something illegal in this area you can be arrested. The lives of other citizens are also in this public area. Likewise you're freedom isn't hindered by this system, unless your a wanted criminal. This monitoring idea isn't bad and it doesn't infringe on your rights. You're in public. You're not in your house. The ACLU as with many other traditionally leftists organizations like to screw the betterment of mankind over with ramblings of Constituitional rights. When they know damn well that its simply not true. Its not like these things are being placed in your homes.
Pardon the bad grammar. And most likely spelling I just woke up and hung over
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
How will this software be able to truly establish it's me if my photo in the database is 40 pounds lighter and with contact lenses if I walk around with my glasses on now.
I also wear false teeth so I can change my jawline at will.
Come and get me!
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
I put a visible non-working video camera pointed at the street and our local crack-house, and their business collapsed. The house in question was rented by a slum-lord to the lowest bidder and the drug traffic was driving me nuts. I made a good show of the camera and suddenly, the 'customers' were a bit leery. The druggies soon moved out and were replaced by a rather nice poor family.
I was set to get the camera working, but the it's presence was enough. Highly recomended. PS: I removed the camera once it became obvious that the new tenants were cool.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I can't wait for the surviellance society.
Pretty damn quick the powers that be will learn that people believe one thing Sunday morning and a completely different thing Friday night.
There's a reason Playboy and High Times stay in business -- although they don't freely admit it, people like sex and drugs. Just imagine our moral leaders' dismay at having their noses shoved in that nasty little fact with corroborating statistics. And the realization that you can't legislate human nature.
According to the report, it almost doesn't work at all. Other installations using face recognition have degenerated into checking out the girls. I understand; it's gotta be boring as can be after the first 50,000 false alarms.
It seems to me that this software isn't really an invasion of our privacy. The cameras themselves may be, but if we accept the cameras, we can't really quibble about the face recognition software.
It's time to reconsider our concepts of privacy, anyway. Read David Brin's The Transparent Society and see if you don't come up with a new view.
I think the cameras should be everywhere... especially the police station. And we should all be allowed to watch them. It would certainly make everyone think twice about their biases before taking drastic action.
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
I just don't get it. I've been reading slashdot for years, comments and all. I've never posted anything negative, usually I ask a relevent question or try to make a joke. What else is there to do at work?
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
looks like someone's paying attention.
kudos
The Digital Couture Collection
I second that, you hit the nail on the head.
Kudos.
MOM
Lets hope one of those twins doesen't turn evil...
crazy dynamite monkey
Face scanning as performed by the police then differs in two ways: (1) It is being performed by public servants. (2) It is potentially done in any public spaces.
If you don't want to be on a store security camera, don't go to the store. If you don't want to be in the police face-scan database, don't ever go out of your house.
See the difference?
Mod me down, pleeeeeease?!!!!
BASTARDS.
...but I did imagine several lawyers all jostling each other as they peered into a camera connected to a computer.
Liberty uber alles.
I read the ACLU pdf file, and found their conclusions interesting, particularly regarding the high number of false positives, and that the system was taken out of use basically because they were discouraged how few matches they were getting.
But the one question that wasn't asked or answered in this piece is very important -- did the crime rate in that area drop during that period? Because if it did, the face recognition system may actually be working, and not seeing criminals may be a GOOD thing!
If the system actually deters crime, and criminals know about the system being in place, it wouldn't be unexpected that criminals would choose to actively avoid that area, leading to a lower detection rate! Did they consider that?
It strikes me that there is a pretty easy test one could give to these machines. They talk about the database of millions of photos (of criminal, hopefully). Why don't they compare each of the photos to the others in the database? If there are many hits it's obvious that there is a big false positive problem....
Or, it might find that some people believed to be different people are actually the same person.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Check out images.google.com
type in "your name" in quotes in the search engine. If you have a home page with a picture, it will probably come up. Ok, so you have a home page, you can't really complain about your picture being online.
But, if you've ever been pictured in an online newspaper, (as in, local high school soccer team wins state championship, team members include: name, name, name, name), that picture may also be indexed and searchable by your name.
Just for the info, the register has an article detailing how the police in Tampa have stopped using face recogntion as it hasn't identified any criminal while still giving false positives.
Back In late September I read and/or heard about these face recognition devices. According to statistics, the results were exactly correct.
Assume a 90% accuracy with a database of 10 criminals. If there are 100,000 samples, 10% will be false positives. That's 10,000 alarms that mean nothing. Of the remaining 90,000 people, you'll get 9 true alarms (assume they walk by!) and 1 gets away. Therefore you have to fend off about a thousand errors to get a real suspect. At that point, human error could easily step in and assume it's another false alarm.
This is the same objective reason racial profiling is wrong. You spend all your time and resources harrassing innocent people.
Of course, a cheap solution to this problem is multiple camera angles.
Viisage technology is NOT the best on the market. However, one cannot check the results of testing online at the International Biometric Group website. Guess they don't think it's important for the whole world to know what algorithm gives the best results in independent testing. If your curious, The winner was the Canadian Company AcSys Biometrics Face Recognition Systems.
Face Recognition is the least intrusive of the Big Brother security technologies. Especially when you take into consideration that scanning a crowd for a certain face will not work . Let's be real here kids, some companies are simply lying about what thier programs can do.
Polygraphs (so-called "lie detectors") have a failure rate of around 60%.
False means true and true means false, now your polygraph is 20% more accurate!
They also use a form of it in Orlandos 'Church Street Station.' It attempts to figure out what your doing somehow. It's quite funny to see people get arested for hugging or kissing since it sometimes dispatches the police for mugging or rape.
There's no evidence that the face-matching algorithm is the problem. It is for false positives, but the lack of true positives is just as likely to be a lack of... positives.
There is evidence that the face-matching is the problem, and that evidence is in fact the false positives, of which there were quite a number (fourteen over three days). Personally, I see false positives as a more damning failure than a lack of true positives.
There's a fundamental fact that is why both the lack of true positives isn't the problem, and why false positives are nigh-inevitable. That fact is that criminals are ridiculously less common than non-criminals. Even an extremely accurate and specific face recognition system is going to make more false positives than true ones. It's just an artifact of probability, which is why I'm against using these automated systems in the first place. That this particular system made so many false positives is indeed an indication that it sucks, however.
But humans don't make very many false positives, you might say. And that's true (though it does happen). We do have a very advanced image recognition algorithm in our meat-computers. But that's not all. Think about whose faces you recognize. Have you only seen them in a single photograph? Or have you talked with them, seen their face from many angles and with many facial expressions? How many of those people would you recognize having only seen their driver's license photo? Even us, the world-renowned best human face recognizers ever, need some help to get the job done. Having a photo of everyone on earth won't fix this problem.
Basically, you are doomed from the start not only by probability, but also by the handicaps you're starting your system with.
The enemies of Democracy are
As a private (not public) citizen, the use of such face recognition systems inherently means they record my likeness.
In theory, under time-tested requirements for media recording, they cannot use my likeness without my permission.
Yet they are.
I did not grant usage to them, when I walked on the sidewalk. I did not sign a contract granting them usage in a film or TV show.
They stole my copyright!
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Original (false) program
> face.is_terrorist = TRUE;
> police.arrest(face.parent);
> police.beat(face.parent);
> police.eatDonuts();
Actual program in use:
face.is.terrorist = TRUE;
police.arrest(face.parent);
drunk.fan.avoid.arrest(face.parent);
police.shoot(face.parent);
identity.validate(face.parent) != face.is.terrorist;
police.coverup(face.parent);
police.status(murderer.parent);
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I'm new to the Tampa area and just visited Ybor city for the first time yesterday. I noticed the cameras around, but I noticed almost no Police presence. Odd. That said, Ybor City is sort of a dump. Do yourself a favor and stay away.
Enter Facex. That's essentially what this face recognition stuff is doing - compiling a profile of a face that it sees, and then checking for other profiles that are similar. Given the multitude of conditions that can affect what it sees (lighting, angle, and facial expression to name a few), it's going to take some very ingenious programming to overcome these influences. Further, I'd love to see the ACLU (or other party) conduct some studies to see just how innaccurate this system is when dealing with other factors - like whether or not someone is wearing sunglasses, whether or not they have a beard and/or moustache, makeup (lipstick, blush, eye shadow), whether or not they're wearing a hat, etc.
FaceIt, it appears, is an overhyped technology that isn't any where near ready for prime time. And knowing what it's up against, I don't think it ever will be.
i live about 15mins from Ybor, out here in Brandon, FL.. and as much as Ybor wants not to be, that place is a dump. But the good side is all the fun one can have there :). Last time i went there was for a Fear Factory concert, before the cameras were up. I still just think this is all one big waste of money, with an attempt to please someone, somewhere. They wouldnt bother me, but so far that i heard, there hasnt been 1 arrest made.
I for one can't wait to see a camera the next time im at an airport. I will make funny faces as i walk through and laugh as the security guards say "excuse me sir, can you please walk past the camera again" as i hold up the line and say "but why? i already smuggled 50 pounds of explosives onto the plane"
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.