Slashdot Mirror
Face Recognition - Real or Science Fiction?
An anonymous reader writes "Facial recognition software has been touted as one of the technologies that will change our future, particularly in law enforcement. How close are we to being recognized by a computer anywhere we go, as portrayed in movies like Minority Report? According to the industry's recent Public Relations releases, these products are closer than we think.
The reality though, is that current products work only when utilizing a small comparative sample, and any attempts for an individual to disguise themselves typically throw off the results. To see how far this technology needs to go before becoming mainstream, one site utilized Government-tested face recognition software, available freely through MyHeritage.com, to compare hundreds of famous people, animals, and cartoons to a database of 2,000 celebrities. Some of the results showed promise for the technology, but most were just funny — for example, who would mistake Barbara Streisand for Shrek, or Lance Bass of N'Sync for a Teletubby?"
Surely trying to match people with cartoons or puppets is never going to work - what do they really expect. They sort of facial clues you get from a real person and very different to what you could get from a cartoon.
But, this does scare me - I invisage a future wear the government knows where you are at any time, if not by picking up your face on the streets, to embedding some sort of chip. This is the way we are heading (sure, not for a while, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't think 20 year ahead)
So I guess next time a teletubby or Shrek wanders through a mall, they're totally going to throw off the face-recognition software.
Is it just me, or does that seem like a stupid way to test the software? If you want to show that rudimentary disguise is an easy way to get around it, that's valid, but just messing with the sample of potential matches by throwing in cartoon characters destroys the validity of the "study".
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Not to nitpick excessively, but you could easily substitute portions of this article with terms like (and relating to) “Internet”, “personal computer”, “telephone”, “car”, and others. Asking ourselves if a technology is “real or science fiction” when it already exists (albiet in a primitive form) is silly. Of course it exists; the question itself cites examples. Perhaps the meaningful questions might be along the lines of: “what are the challenges associated with making it accurate?” or “what impact will facial recognition have on society?”
Why bother.
I saw the same thing. Also, if the person in the image is doing something with their face (smiling, open mouth, wide eyes) it tends to match with images of people doing the same thing. Kinda simplistic, more like a trick than a tool.
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
Okay, so I look like your regular geek. I'm fat and bald. Yet I apparently look like some hot female movie stars. 80% like Grace Kelly. Not sure if I can link directly to a result. Let's try: http://www.myheritage.com/FP/photo.php?siteID=1&ph otoID=5969307&source=album&sourceID=963790&albumID =963790
Granted - the examples looked pretty good, but I just can't see Grace Kelly when I look myself in the mirror.
I believe Minority Report used retina scans, but that nit aside facial recognition works to a degree and will only get better. Security cams will eventually upgrade to HDTV resolutions, perhaps augmented with very high resolution stills when a potential match is made. This will all take more processing power, but all mighty god Moore will eventually gives us this day our daily CPU load.
About false positives. So what? Eyewitnesses make mistakes also. Eventually, perhaps very soon, machines will surpass humans in this arena just as they have in others. Can anyone here on Slashdot defeat Deep Blue at Chess?
As to the legality or ethics, what can be done will be done, at least in public areas. If it would be legal for a human to do (they haven't outlawed humans scanning for suspects in public areas) then it will be legal for machines to do despite the unease many will feel knowing they are constantly being watched.
Letter To Iran
Using a computer-captured image of your face in Court would presumably come under the same rules as using a photograph of your face. More or less, if you appear in public, your image can be used.
The more interesting question, I suggest, is whether a computer recognition of your face is going to be in any way equivalent to a human recognition of your face.
For example: if you stroll into a 7-Eleven, and the donuphage with a badge sitting there swilling coffee thinks you look like a famous bank robber whose mug has been circulated by the FBI, then he's entitled to take you into custody, and search you (for his own safety and those nearby, et cetera). If he finds half a gram of coke on you, you're in trouble. Now suppose it isn't the cop's eye/brain combination that "recognizes" you as a bank robber, but rather his shoulder-mounted camera/computer combination. Is he still entitled to act in the same way?
You can argue it both ways: (1) the camera/computer is almost certainly always going to be worse at this kind of thing than the eye/brain. Recognition is about the single most important thing our eyes and brains do, and they are highly optimized for it by natural selection. If it could be done better and faster, we would do it. So, we should trust the camera/computer less. But (2) the camera/computer is not subject to the vagaries of human psychology, mood, et cetera. The cop may take you in unreasonably because he doesn't like your skin color or length of hair, the camera/computer isn't subject to the same prejudices. So maybe it's better to trust the mindless device.
or, maybe it's better to not carry a half-gram of coke on you.
Or what computer program, camera, and lighting that you have. And add facial hair (perhaps on all), cosmetics(again on all), or even haircuts. Basically, it will always fail on those that do not want to be recognized. But down the road(20 year), it will work well on those that are not suspecting it i.e. it will be a good way to track down regular citizens when the government is granted the power to grab whoever they want and attribute it to say terrorism. Fortunately, we are a long ways from that. Or are we?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Many other problems in CV are like this - edge detection, segmentation, etc. But people write hacks that work in restricted conditions and say they've solved.
Having worked in brain science for years I can say that the brain itself is a collection of hacks.
It's just a very huge collection that covers all of the bases that we find ourselves in from day to day. Put a brain in a situation it's not designed to handle and it breaks down just as badly as many artificial CV algorithms do.
Are skulls that unique? I was sure the unicity was contributed to by not just bone structure, but muscle structure, cartilage(the nose) and pigmentation. In fact, do we know for sure that no two faces are unique? Until facial recognition can tell fraternal twins better than a human can, perhaps we shouldn't put those in mission critical environments, shall we?
I'm afraid I'm going to call shennanigans on some of this. I've been doing Vision work for about 5 years now with a hefty does of image and signal processing in the mix(Working as gradstudent in the field right now in fact). Edge detection is well defined. The canny and shah-istan(think that's the name) are about as close to a mathematical optimal edge detector as one can get. There is in fact a well developed body of theory regarding differentiation of Signals. The problem doesn't lie in the mathematical models involved. It lies in how many people want to use those models. Edge detection suffers from spurious edges or edge flakes which are a symptom of noise in the signal at differention(ie differentiation enhances noise, integration smooths it). Segmentation can also be well defined you just have to be clear on what it is you're segmenting. Are you working in a color space, texture, motion? That matters. However you can get some very good results in these fields. See GPCA techniques for some examples of doing it. Or even modified PCA + EM or PCA+ Kmeans(clustering theory). Again very well defined. Mathematically there are several models for face recognition. One can examine the ideas of eigen faces(not my personal favorite but it's there), kernel based SSD type approaches to find key points, partial face detection followed by recognition over a sequence of images used to reconstruct the face, and more. The problem isn't the math. It's that when you project a model you are essentially destroying an entire degree of freedom which is a huge deal. Further just as you can match a partial finger print or a partial ear print you can match partial facechunks. The problem with makeup or facial hair comes when one relies on global matching techniques or uses only 2d information to do the matching. Now I'll be a first to say that alot of computer vision is a solution in search of a problem or that people do use a number of cheap hacks and dirty tricks to get things working but saying it's not mathematical is a lie. I can turn around and see at least 3 books at a glance that detail the mathematics that are a part of vision and image processing. So please don't confuse peoples fuzzy use or lack of understanding of the math for there being no math. Note: Machines are also bad at a number of tasks humans are really good at but the same can be said that there are many tasks that humans are very bad at but the machines excel at. Absolute range detection is a good example. Humans are very bad at telling you the exact range to an object, even with some sort of scale of the scene reference. Computers on the other hand(while suffering from noise in the signal) are still able to achieve significant accuracy depending on the range. You can see tyzx for an example of a comany who makes highly accurate stereo rigs.(They were around as of 2 years ago at least and I assume they're still going strong) Cheers
I don't care what you say, all I need is my Wumpabet soup.