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Facial Recognition Fails in Boston, Too
bryan writes "Only a few weeks after cameras were found to be ineffective in catching criminals in Tampa, FL, a test of a facial-recognition system in Boston's Logan airport also came up disappointing. The cameras which were given photos of employees to detect, were only successful in 153 out of 249 random tests over the past year (about 61%). The article did not say how many false positives the tests generated. The companies involved were Indentix and Visage."
But what about the system installed in London, England?
That one doesn't track faces per se. It indexes along bad teeth.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
The issue of false positives is one that seems to rarely be mentioned with biometric identification and this concerns me greatly as its use poliferates. I'm especially interested in finding more information about the inkless digital fingerprint scanners that many states use for issuing drivers licenses. My understanding is that no image of the fingerprint is actually stored, just a digital signature of the print making visual confirmation (when and if law enforcement agencies start using them for their obvious purposes) impossible. I understand that the FBI's own fingerprint database requires a visual confirmation as they've found a problem with false positives in their database but at least they have that data. Does anyone have any knowledge about this? Any manufacturer specs/pointers? Stories good or bad?