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Tampa Police Give Up On Face Recognition Cameras
Saint Aardvark writes "The city of Tampa has given up on their face-recognition system attached to street surveillance cameras."
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The Register has a story here.
Interestingly enough, they mention successful system in Scotland being up to 70% successful in "crowd".
At an ATM it can/could work very well, when you're walking down the street, in motion with your head at various angls, no wonder it doesn't work. As far as PC's go thumb would probably be more likely
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Thats because your mind stores such information holographically. You have two eyes set 1-3/4 inches or so apart. That gives you 3D image that is stored in your visual cortex AS a 3D image. The eyes of the observee are a major aspect of facial recognition. 2D cameras dont record the subtleties of eye color and iris detail.
You dont recognize people that you have never seen before. If you were to see a photograph in 2D of some random individual, then try to find that person in a flowing crowd under varying light conditions and facial expressions, you probably wouldn't be able to recognize that individual. It takes several months to teach a person to do this. Even expert law enforcement personnell cannot do this without a certain ingrained talent for recognizing faces.
Stupid Humans.....
Not even the fact that it doesnt work is really interesting; the fact that face recognition technology used in this way is, and always will be, worthless was known already.
Face recognition is useful when comparing small groups against a large database, or a large group against a small database since you can trim the fuzzy factors to get more false positives or more false negatives. For example, if you want to find the identity of a certain suspect in a large database you can have it spit out 10 suggestions of who it could be and eliminate the false positives manually. Or if you use it for access control you can trim it to reject as much as possible, as someone going through an access control can adjust their face for optimal lighting and try again.
But to use it to scan random people under bad conditions and compare against a large database where you dont want either false positives or false negatives is idiocy and the system will be completely useless as you'll either get dozens of random false positives each day and haul in innocent people who probably look nothing like the match or you wont get the actual matches at all.
The companies like former Visionics trying to push these systems for crowd use are selling snake oil. It doesnt work today and as the factors making it unusable cant really be significantly improved upon it wont work in the future either.
This reminds me of a DUI checkpoint I saw a couple of months ago. They had not one, but TWO signs 6 and 4 blocks, respectively, that said, "DUI checkpoint ahead". There were plenty of opportunities to turn down another street and avoid it altogether.
I actually saw a pretty intelligent use of signs by cops once. lollapalooza was held in an outdoor venue near where I used to live. People leaving the show had to get on a limited-access highway and go about 2 miles before there was an exit, and everyone leaving the show had to drive to that exit. About a mile before the exit, they placed several large signs that said 'Drug checkpoint ahead. All cars will be searched.'
Of course, that would be illegal to do, and there was no 'drug checkpoint' at all. Instead, the police waited around for people to illegally u-turn across the median and then busted those people. We just kept driving, and sure enough, no checkpoint. After we made a legal u-turn at the next exit, we saw someone swerve across the median, and then saw two cops streak after them, sirens blazing. I don't think we stopped laughing the whole way home. Sure, it's an underhanded method, but anyone who knows their rights wouldn't fall for it.
http://xkcd.com/386/
The Osprey's shortcomings were over-publicized for the most part. Many new aircraft have significant problems, especially one so radically different as the Osprey. The fact that some officers decided to try and cover up the problems didn't help public perception, but that's just what it was - perception, not fact.
The Marine Corps needs a new medium-lift helo. The CH-46 Sea Knight is entirely too old. Have you ever ridden in one? I have, and believe me when I tell you that we don't call them "Flying Coffins" because we thought the name sounded pretty.
The Osprey isn't perfect, but it's an example of a system that can be great if given the chance.
Although your point is Valid, the Osprey (V-22) is a bad example. The V-22 is actually a very well put together aircraft and has been performing very well. All the test piolets seem to love flying it and all of them have told me that the plane transitions from hover to flight seamlessly. The vehicle flies about twice as fast as a conventional rotoary aircraft and can lift a fair amount more cargo. The USMC is slated to purchase quit a few to replace the aging (30-40 year old) CH46 fleet, and it is sorely needed.
As far as it being forced on the military, thats a line of crap. The Marines (to write about what I know) are very much excited about getting their grubbies on the plane, however as usual with transitions there are a few old horses who feel that the CH46 is fine. 'it's not broke so don't fix it'.
The crashes you refer to numbered 3. And they all occured early in the V-22's test cycle. Although not official, some opinions are that the crash was caused by piolets trying to hotshot a little too much in the planes.