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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."
As super-duper as high-tech is, I think even /.'ers would admit that its not a panacea (yet) for all our security ills. The very idea of having a computer capable of accurately identifying one face in thousands -- scanning from afar -- is far fetched. Despite billions in research we've yet to master voice recognition which is, comparatively, much easier to do.
Ah well, what's another few hundred million of tax payer's money shot. I'm sure it made some contractor rich.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
"Kelly Shannon, spokeswoman for the State Department's consular affairs office, said the Logan Airport results would not affect plans to use face recognition to enhance passport security"
So it doesn't work, won't help, and might even end up hurting more that a few people, but it's going to enhance passport security?
And Apparently OZ thinks it's a good idea too? "We now have an international standard established, which is the adoption of facial recognition as the international biometric, and that has left us well placed to move to implementation."
Seems like the flase positive rate would be the most important stat, and they don't have it.
Obviously it couldn't replace ANY other security measure, but if it worked 61% of the time with NO false positives, I would call that pretty damn successful, especially in such an early implementation.
They said 10 of the 19 hijackers went through Logan - so this system theorhetically would have caught 6 of them? Better than none. And it seems like the technology would improve with time.
Personally I'd rather have my face scanned then have them strip searching me because my credit sucks and I paid cash for my plane ticket.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
As with most biometric systems, this is only ever works reliably in a lab.
Remeber the fingerprint system that got fooled by gelatine-gummi's ?
I wonder when these dot-bomb ideas will stop popping back up, and more credible research will get the much needed funds.
There is only one thing that has ever been able to recognize the human face; other humans. (And we do a rather poor job of it too after 10 million years of evolution!!!)
Proof: Take your average ignorant North American, (like myself) and ask him to tell the difference between 3 different Asian individuals. There is a good chance that we would fail that test because we are not used to (or mentally trained to) spot the difference.
{I love using myself for proof, it's so scientific}
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
A government test in 2002 found that face-recognition systems scored correct matches more than 90% of the time when used for such one-to-one identifications.
Once again, the false positives are not given. That is the number that really matters in a society where you can be held in prison indefinitely without a trial or access to a lawyer.
They said 10 of the 19 hijackers went through Logan - so this system theorhetically would have caught 6 of them? Better than none
The 9/11 hijackers used their real names and real ID. If they'd been placed on a simple watch list of names then strcmp would have found them, not some highfalutin' face recognition system. It's not the technology here, but coordination between the three letter agencies that's needed.
John.
Yes, indeed. Visage is very fond of saying their system is designed for 1:1 comparisions, not database searches, and that it has a 90% success rate.
There are 2 problems with this, though:
The first is the false-positive rate. Visage is saying that, nine times out of ten, they can tell if the person being presented for inspection matches the photo. But what if they incorrectly flag one out of every fifteen users as *not* matching the picture? More work for Border control, that's what. The Mark One Eyeball is still the fastest, cheapest, best tool for comparing photos to people.
Second, it pays no mind to *false* papers with *correct* photographs. Sure, their fancy system will say "Yup, the person pictured is standing in front of you!" but if the underlying documentation is fake, so what?
Visage is a private company chasing lucrative federal dollars. All they need to do is create a product good enough to persuade Federal agencies to buy it - they don't actually need to make sure it does anything useful.