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?"
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 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
or, maybe it's better to not carry a half-gram of coke on you.
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.