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Face Recognition On Mobile Phones
gpvillamil writes: "This article describes a collaboration between Motorola, Visionics and Wirehound to build in an automatic mug shot recognition capability into mobile phones. Particularly interesting is how the phones will scan all faces in the field of view, and indicate matches by an instant short message."
Calling a restaurant:
- Would you have a table at 19:00 ?
- Yes, but you'd better change into something with a tie, mister!
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I can just see it. Walking down the street and some cops cell phone mistakes me for a murderer and then next thing I know I'm in jail. The odds are that the software is going to make a mistake, and how do you convince the police that it's not you.
MG
Randomly distributing Karma whenever possible.
I'm just waiting for the ads showing the PCS guy with one of these phones.
PCSG:John, tell me what happened.
John:Well, me and some buddies were out having a guys' night out. We had some drinks. Everything was going pretty good. Then this girl came up to us. She was really HOT!
PCSG:John, did you go home with her?
John:(Sheepishly) Yeah.
PCSG:What happened next?
John:I woke up in a bathtub full of ice, with a note that said I should call 911, and found out I was missing a kidney!
PCSG:John, what you really need is this new PCS phone with face recognition technology. You could have identified her and let one of your buddies "jump on the grenade"
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Seems like a pretty cool set up, right? Not quite.. start flipping through the timeline archives this guy has saved up (the "flo watch" button). As you click through, note how many times it seems like the cat would be permitted to enter, yet it comes up not letting him through the door. this day was a particularily bad day for the system. We, as humans, would have positively identified the cat properly. Computers, obviously, can't do that yet with any high accuracy.
Now granted "law enforcement" versions are going to be a wee bit more sophisticated, but if the cell phone version has even half the errors this cat detector does, are we ever gonna be able to put any faith into this technology?
Is a BS artist company. The products do not work as advertised. The problem isnt in the products tho, it is in the advertising.
Facial recognition works fine for security checks, where your face gets compared against a small database and the recognition software can be trimmed to rejecting people. The physical settings like lighting can provide the best possible conditions for the software to provide an accurate match, and people can try again if they get rejected.
It also works fine in finding possible matches for a photo in a database. Now you can trim the software to a high acceptance rate, and get a bunch of likely matches which you can sort manually.
But it does not work if you need to compare a large database like wanted libraries against a massive number of people because you cannot have it both be certain to trigger on the people it's interested in but not the people it doesnt want. You get a minimum of false positives and negatives which will become most of the triggers when you have a large dataset. A device which will be wrong almost all the time isnt useful.
Of course, the actual article is rather fuzzy about the use. If it's used for scanning suspects at the site to speed up police work, it will actually be useful. If it's used for scanning everyone the police passes it wont be. And with Visionics being involved in various of the spectacular post 9/11 'facial recognition' projects, I wouldnt be surprised if they attempt to pull another bullshit job.
Since phones are primarily an audio device, wouldn't voice recignition be more feasible? I haven't heard much about voice metrics being used to verify identity, though sound interfaces are easier to install than video.
They'd better secure the transmission and storage of this data, because one excellent application for this would be to steal biometrics. The bad guys can then impersonate who they will be either hacking their cell phones to send your biometric, or by even simpler means.
As an example, the current generation system being deployed in airports can be fooled by a picture which is xeroxed and worn like a mask. I read an account of a demonstration of the technology at an airport where the company's rep put on such an improvised mask with Osama Bin-Laden's face on it -- triggering the alarm of course. My reaction to that was -- this is supposed to make me feel safe?
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Since when do you have an expectation of privacy sitting in a cafe?
You have none. However, the poster does have a real point, just bad terminology.
Obviously you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place: Anyone who happens to look (or point a camera) in your direction can see whatever it is that you're doing. You do have an expectation of some level of anonymity in many public places, however, and that brings with it a sort of privacy. Anyone can see what you're doing, but no one knows who you are.
But this expectation of anonymity is a very relative thing, and it's also a very *new* thing if you look at all of human history. Even today, residents of very small towns (say, less than a thousand people) have no expectation of anonymity in a public place. Anonymity in public is a phenomenon that arose first in large cities and more recently in very mobile populations.
Is public anonymity a good thing? Maybe. A necessary thing? Clearly not (I think privacy *is* a necessary thing).
One way to look at this is just as a continuation of the development of the "global village". That term is usually used to indicate the ease with which people throughout the world can communicate and trade, but one aspect of a real "village" is that no one in it is a complete stranger. Having lived in a very small town, I can tell you that everyone knowing everyone else has both advantages and disadvantages. In a small town, you know who you can trust and who you can't (and there are typically very few of the latter, which is why many people in small towns don't lock their doors). OTOH, it really sucks for the person who does one stupid thing one time and puts themselves into the "can't trust" category.
All of this presumes that the mobile face recognition technology (or any face recognitiion technology, for that matter) really works, which at present it does not. Current face recognition technology does quite a good job at comparing an image and a template and deciding "is this probably the same person?" Good in the sense that it's fairly difficult to pass yourself off as someone else. However, when you change the problem to matching an image against a database of templates and deciding "Which person, if any, is this one?" then current FR tech is horribly bad. The birthday paradox makes this a really hard problem to scale.
Given the fact that even humans, with their relatively small databases of a few thousand faces and highly developed recognition abilities, occasionally make mis-identifications, it's by no means certain that computers will ever be able to do this well on a large scale.
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You are NOT on the wrong track. These posters are in every likelihood programmed zombie clones who believe that certain trucks are, 'Like a Rock', 'McDonald's Makes You Smile', and who, 'Just Do It'. --Either that, or they are Cointelpro agents assigned to keeping the bias and percieved popular opinion on Slashdot in the far, far right on sensitive issues. (--Naturally I'm just joking about the agents. Programmed zombie people are more than enough to get the job done.)
I don't give a hoot about how such morons interpret privacy law. Having my face scanned, databased and tracked by tax funded agencies while I walk through a public area is creepy and fascist. Period.
It's the "Spirit of the Law", you twits!
-Fantastic Lad
It occurs to me that not everyone knows what the birthday paradox is:
For those who aren't familiar with it, the birthday paradox comes from the old party game question "Are there two people in this room with the same birthday?" The naive, commonsense answer would consider that there 366 possible birthdays in a year and expect that out of, say, a group of 30 people there's only a roughly 10% probability that two have the same birthday. That would be a good estimate of the probability of one person in the room having a particular birthday, but the problem is that in the room there are 870 (30*29) different "pairs" of birthdays, and the odds one pairing has the same birthday is quite high (I'm too lazy to calculate it, but it's around 70%).
In the case of face recognition and other identification technologies, it's like having 300 million people in the room and the problem is how to extract enough information from a face to create a relatively "unique" facial signature, because if there's even a small probability that signatures of two different faces will be the same, you will get *lots* of false pairings. Suppose that there is a 10e-6 probability that a random image will match a random template. In a nation of 300 million that means there will be, on average, 300 other people that, to the computer, look just like you. Worse, if you have a database of, say 1,000 bad guys, and you have an airport with 100,000 people passing through it daily, you'll get an average of 100 false positives *per day*.
And current FR tech is a long way from the 10e-6 false positive level. More like 10e-3 (meaing in the airport scenario that for every passenger passing through the terminal, the computer will find one possible match in the bad guy database. On average, of course).
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