Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
If you ignore the privacy worries for a minute the most interesting thing
in this story is that the system didn't work. It didn't work in Tampa,
it didn't work in Pinellas County and it isn't working in Virgina Beach.
So you've got a dud system that's wasting police time. In Tampa they had
a full time officer using the system who could have been out on the streets
in the community that he is trying to protect understanding and interacting
with that community. If you talk to police officers, reporters, or social
workers I think you'd find that they value highly local knowledge in doing
their jobs, not all seeing all knowing eyes in the sky.
John.
that they have lost face?
But after two years, it yielded no positive identifications
I'm sorry, I didn't catch that... how many false positives did you say the system had?
These systems will never work untill they can figure out a way to store such information as faces and other physical attributes holographically. 2D photography won't ever do it accurately enough to make the system functional.
Stupid Humans.....
Why not site these cameras at ports and airports as any dodgy people would appear with their faces obscured so you could just arrest them...
The Register has a story here.
Interestingly enough, they mention successful system in Scotland being up to 70% successful in "crowd".
Cameras on every corner. Web based cameras. Pan and zooming cameras... With some recognition software.. We could build something that dispenses beads when it recognizes ... umm...
Or not. It didn't work. No duh. Did anyone really think it would? I always got the idea of the guy selling these was like the monorail salesman in the Simpsons.
I'm completely amazed that the general public has become conditioned to tolerate this crap from law enforcement. Yes, it's nice that it's gone now, but we all know it will be back. And furthermore, the cameras themselves are still there!!! I mean, come on!! We should be outraged enough that the cameras are there, let alone the facial recognition.
Is civil disobedience dead or has civil disobedience become outlawed? What sort of legal/semi-legal countermeasures can be taken against surveillence cameras set up in public places? I'd love to have some sort of laser pointer that I can point at cameras in public areas to break them.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
... with more effective pattern matching software watching it: human cops. I think that's a better deterrent to crime than the flaky software they've given up on.
Police are at a loss to explain why the software wasn't effective, since it seemed to work fine in controlled testing, Guidara said.
If I were selling you a million dollar system it would work when I showed it off too.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
This news site dosen't seem to be up to the slashdot effect. Heres the text.
Tampa police eliminate facial-recognition system
By MITCH STACY
Associated Press
AP Photo
A surveillance camera is seen in the Ybor City area of Tampa, Fla., in this June 2001, file photo.
TAMPA, Fla. -- Civil-rights advocates celebrated a decision by Tampa police to scrap a highly touted facial-recognition software system that was designed to scan the city's entertainment district for wanted criminals.
But after two years, it yielded no positive identifications and no arrests.
"It was of no benefit to us, and it served no real purpose," Capt. Bob Guidara said Wednesday, emphasizing the decision to drop the software was based on its ineffectiveness rather than privacy issues.
Tampa became the first city in the United States to install the software in June 2001 to scan faces in Ybor City nightlife district and check them against a database of more than 24,000 felons, sexual predators and runaway children.
But critics said it violated privacy rights, forcing Ybor City visitors to be in what amounted to an electronic police lineup without their consent.
Darlene Williams, chairwoman of the Tampa area chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she's glad it's gone.
"People have the right to be anonymous, and not to be put in a police lineup for committing the offense of walking down a public street," Williams said.
"As a culture we have always given police the tools that are deemed appropriate to do their jobs. (But) this was handled without public input or foreknowledge, and that was wrong."
New Jersey-based Visionics Corp. had offered the city a free trial use of a the program, called FaceIt. It was installed on closed-circuit cameras that police used to monitor Ybor City crowds on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
A police officer in a room three blocks away monitored video images and could pick out faces in the crowd to scan and run through a criminal database to search for matches.
Initially, it could be used only with one of the system's 36 cameras at a time, but an upgrade last year allowed use on up to six of the cameras.
Critics compared it to George Orwell's novel "Animal farm" and Texas Rep. Dick Armey, the U.S. House majority leader at the time, called for congressional hearings on the technology. Protesters donned bandanas, masks and Groucho glasses on one busy Saturday night to show their contempt.
Police are at a loss to explain why the software wasn't effective, since it seemed to work fine in controlled testing, Guidara said.
Meir Kahtan, a spokesman for the company, now known Identix Inc. after a merger between Visionics and the security technology company Identix, declined to answer questions on the matter Wednesday.
The company's only comment came in a one-sentence statement that seems to suggest privacy issues were behind the Tampa's decision.
"Identix has always stated that this technology requires safeguards, and that as a society we need to be comfortable with its use."
Guidara said the closed-circuit cameras installed in 1997 will remain in Ybor City without the face-scanning capabilities. They are effective as a deterrent and have helped police foil crimes, he said.
Face-scanning technology is still being used in other cities. The airport, jail and jail visitation areas in Pinellas County are using it, but it has never resulted in an arrest, officials said.
Virginia Beach, Va., installed the software on closed-circuit cameras along the city's boardwalk last summer. While it has never produced a hit or an arrest, police spokesman Sgt. Max Hayden said it performed well in controlled tests and may be a deterrent to criminals. Signs along the boardwalk inform visitors of its use.
"It would not be prudent to take technology offline when it's been up and running for a year, based on another city deciding not to use it," Hayden said.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
This has been a MAJORLY over-hyped technology. Facial recognition isn't so hard, but the attentional mechanisms required to pick faces out of a crowd reliably under varying lighting conditions are still iffy at best. Most still seem to rely on skin color detection to pick out candidate areas of a scene, and, frankly, that method is still pretty dicey when used out in the real world.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
This is awesome ... finally I can visit Tampa again!
Not disapointing at all. Sure the gee-whiz factor is pretty cool, but I for one value my freedom.
The idea that if every damn corner has a camera , and it can report to a central database who it sees then it means that every damn step I take is monitored by central government.
Philosophers like Micheal Foucault warned that discipline and obeyance is largely something that comes from people self regulating moderated by the effects of social and institutional surveilance (his critique was deeper than this, but this is a nutshell take on it).
And I sometimes think DISobeyance is a good thing sometimes. When some power that be pisses you off, its almost incumbent on you to give em a kick in the shins. Or rather: F*k illegitimate authority.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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!
Virginia Beach, Va., installed the software on closed-circuit cameras along the city's boardwalk last summer. While it has never produced a hit or an arrest, police spokesman Sgt. Max Hayden said it performed well in controlled tests and may be a deterrent to criminals. Signs along the boardwalk inform visitors of its use.
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.
Does it really take that much intelligence for a criminal to avoid an area where he/she might get caught? While one might be so drunk as to not be able to read the signs, I think law inforcement in these circumstances is being as stupid as these criminals. Maybe it's that think like your enemy strategy.
----
Squirrel
My first reaction was, did they drop it because of community pressure or because it was ineffective?
But after two years, it yielded no positive identifications and no arrests
Unfortunatly, this is not a victory. When the technology is ready, it will be back.
All your base are belong to us!
Rather than have dozens of police officers wandering about the streets more-or-less aimlessly, a smaller number can be directed to trouble spots very quickly.
The logical extension is cameras in homes. Get robbed? No problem, the police have all your video on file, and can just pull up the footage to see who broke into your home.
Or maybe there are pesky political demonstrators marching down the street, interrupting traffic. With the cameras in place, it will be easy to convict them for something to shut them up for a while.
It's not as much what their doing now, it's that the same arguments for what they are doing now can be used to justify real loss of freedom.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
According to a radio report on NPR, Tampa did not spend money directly on the system. The surveillance cameras were already in place (and will remain in place) and Identix provided the software on some kind of free-trial or beta basis. Of course, I'm sure a great deal of police time = money was wasted on training, etc.
The reporter discussed the issue of false positives with the interviewee, in a somewhat vague way. The reporter said, sensibly enough, something like "Isn't the problem that if you require too many measurements to match you don't get identifications, and that if you only require a few you get false positives?" The interviewee concurred. I got the impression that the police department might have insisted that the system be tuned to a level where they were not wasting time on false positives, and at that level there were simply no matches.
The reporter also asked (also sensibly) whether the apparent lack of success could have been because the system's installation was widely publicized and the bad guys knew better than to show up in Ybor City. Interestingly enough, the interviewee said something like "If I believed that, it would be a great thing and I'd want to keep the system in place forever." I was, however, left with the distinct impression that the interviewee did NOT believe that.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This system seems to have tripped across a common problem with all id recognition systems - face, retina, voice, fingerprint, whatever. That is that they are used in two completely different modes.
One mode is the verification mode: this person claims to be Mr XYZ: is he? For this purpose, you only have one identity to match. If the answer comes out "maybe" instead of "yes" or "no", you can take another photo/scan/whatever. You can use extremely number intensive checking techniques because you are only trying to match ONE face/eye/... to ONE record. And the people being checked have at least some incentive to help their system (remove glasses, get a rescan when they have hair cut or grow beard). Systems can be made to do this very reliably in this mode - call it mode 1.
You can scale this up a little bit, while maintaining reliability. A car, for example, might recognise the voices of four registered drivers and adjust itself to suit, or a secure area form a few tens of people. Call this mode 1A.
The second mode is when you are trying to detect any one of a large list of possible people in a huge crowd, when they may have changed their characteristics significantly, either intentionalyy or unintentionally. Call this mode 2.
The trouble is that a lot of people assume that, if you can scale from 1 to 1A, the scaling from 1A to 2 will be linear. Which it won't. As well as the linear scaling of vastly more records to match (a linear scaleing), there is the the no-rescan, chjanged face, uncooperative facto, which acts quadratically with the fist. This means the problem explodes uncontrollably very soon.
Some of the people making this assumption should know better.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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.
Not necessarily true. Visionics failed miserably as we all know and fell flat on their faces. However new technologies are being developed that greatly enhance facial recognition technologies such as 2d to 3d facial modelling Cyberextruder, wireless mobile, light compensating camera systems JonesCAM.tv, and high speed database systems. Facial recognition and other biometric technologies are merely in their infancy. Biometrics is at the point where the world wide web was in 1994. Its truly about to explode and privacy issues will come up. But I feel in this day and age with all the acts of terrorisim people will give up a little bit of privacy to feel safer. You will also see the greatest use of the technologies in casinos first and foremost. They have money and a ton less privacy issues.
The logical extension is cameras in homes. Get robbed? No problem, the police have all your video on file, and can just pull up the footage to see who broke into your home.
No, that's the illogical suggestion. A slippery slope fallacy, if you will. X does not follow Y.
Or maybe there are pesky political demonstrators marching down the street, interrupting traffic. With the cameras in place, it will be easy to convict them for something to shut them up for a while.
Protesters use their own camera's. It helps prevent police brutality. If a protestor takes part in an illegal protest they are well aware that they can get arrested - often times, that is the whole point. Police already use video provided by the media in cases such as these as well. Should we ban the free press because it's infringing on your (misguided) expectations of privacy in public?
It's not as much what their doing now, it's that the same arguments for what they are doing now can be used to justify real loss of freedom.
CCTVs in public are no different than having a cop on every corner as long as people are aware that the camera's are there. In fact, in a few ways, they are better than a cop. A camera can't be racist or sexist. A camera can't plant drugs on someone or entice them to commit a crime.
It's also much better to secure a conviction based on an image rather than someone's description as well. It has been proven numerous times that people are downright useless when it comes to recalling a person's face.
Basically, what I am saying is CCTV can put more criminals in jail and keep more innocent people out of jail if it is properly used.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
According to this story
During [Aurora, CO's] annual bluegrass festival in 2000, officers posted signs saying "Narcotics checkpoint, one mile ahead" and "Narcotics canine ahead". They then hid on a hill, clad in camouflage, and watched for any people who turned around or appeared to toss drugs out of their windows after seeing the signs.
Stephen Corbin Roth, 60, was pulled over for littering after he threw out what appeared to be a marijuana pipe. Police found a marijuana pipe and mushrooms during a search of his car and he appealed his conviction on possession of drug paraphernalia to the appeals court.
Under the procedure that day, an officer down the road would be told by radio to pull over any vehicle seen littering while an officer on the hill would run down and find the items thrown away.
The appeals court ruled drug checkpoints are illegal because motorists are stopped at random and without reasonable suspicion of committing a crime. However, in Roth's case, the court concluded that finding the marijuana pipe gave the officers probable cause to stop Roth's vehicle.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
After 10 beers, I too have given up my "facial recognition" system.
So many false positives, so many regrets, so much itching and burning....
this sig left intentionally blank
The problem with the Tampa system, or an airport system or any other public environment is that they are all transient in nature. An airport has millions of people going through every year, with a pretty good chunk in a hurry to catch a flight. Many of these people will never pass through that given airport again. You also have a much larger database of positives to pick from. The Tampa system had 30,000 mugshots to base from. There were simply too many out of control variables for the system to be effective. In essence you are looking at a system that doesn't deal well with transient environments. Now let's compare this to casinos where the technology was developed and you'll soon see the flaws with the Tampa system.
The casinos in Vegas have an official "black book" list of only 38 people they are required to keep out, Atlantic City has 173. In addition to this most casinos partake in a mutual database of people that they know or suspect are cheats. From these sources you have a listing of some 3000 - 5000 cheats (source being techs from Vegas I worked with for a while, can't find link to verify) that they want to look out for. They also have something more important. They have an environment where people enter and tend to stay for a few hours. They also have a lot of high quality video cameras from many angles, and have a fixed viewing area. Translation, they don't have nearly as many people to look for, can view a relatively stationary target from multiple angles, and have a lot more time to compare a picked out face to a database, and no security needs that an airport would have that dictate immeadiate detention.
The reasons this works in casinos almost all stack against this working in a public environment like a city center or an airport. The question is, how long until technology improves before such systems would be considered to have an acceptable false positive rate? Standards are also needed for compensation for people who are falsely picked up and miss flights, hotels and the like. A missed airplane flight can be thousands of dollars, what is the appropriate compensation to the poor detained soul that is not in fact a terrorist or criminal?