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Facial Recognition Fails in Boston, Too

Posted by michael on from the see-no-evil dept.

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."

4 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Improbable to start with by lawaetf1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
  2. Same old song and dance.... Snake oil sir? by B5_geek · · Score: 5, Insightful


    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)
  3. Once again... by CGP314 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Wouldn't the false positive rate be more import by JohnGrahamCumming · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.