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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. Not very comforting by wayward_son · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Wasn't Boston/Logan where two of the 9/11 planes took off from?

    Hopefully they weren't putting too many of their eggs in this basket.

    1. Re:Not very comforting by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 0, Redundant

      From the linked article...

      Logan is where 10 of the 19 terrorists boarded the flights that were later hijacked Sept. 11, 2001.

  2. Re:Face recognition by Baron_Yam · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Actually, RTFS (Read The Summary)... the article does not tell you the false positive stats, just the false negatives. In other words, 39% of the time, the terrorist would get on the plane unnoticed, so no valuable interviewer's time would be taken up at all!

  3. Is 61% success really a failure? by forgetmenot · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I mean, is it? 61% doesn't sound like a dismal failure to me at all. That's 61 times out of a 100 that the system recognized a face in a crowd using a technology still in its infancy. Not that I really like the idea of this thing, but it just seems a little premature to pull the plug or dismiss an idea when it's appears to be working well over half the time. It's not like this thing is being used to fly passenger aircraft (in which case, yeah.. 61% success rate is pretty scary).