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In Istanbul, Cameras To Recognize 15,000 Faces/sec.
An anonymous reader writes "Istanbul's popular (and crowded) Istiklal shopping, cafe, and restaurant street is being outfitted with 64 wirelessly controlled, tamper-proof face-recognition cameras attached to a computer system capable of scanning 15,000 faces per second in a moving crowd for a positive match. The link from Samanyolu, badly translated by Google, states that 3 cameras are in place so far and that if trials are successful, this will mark the first time such a system, previously used by Scotland Yard and normally reserved for indoor security use, will be put to use in a public outdoor setting. It also notes that each camera controlled by the system is capable of 'locking onto' the faces of known criminals and pickpockets detected in the crowd and 'tracking' their movements for up to 300 meters before the next, closer placed camera takes over." Hit the link for more of this reader's background on the growing electronic encroachment on privacy in this city, which will be the European Capital of Culture in 2010, causing him to ask, "Is the historic city of Istanbul turning into the new London?"
While the article doesn't state it outright, it would appear likely that the outdoor face recognition system, if "successful," will be expanded to other crowded areas of Istanbul as well, which has already seen a dazzling increase in the number of installed plain-vanilla (non face-recognizing) CCTV cameras in recent years. This comes after Istanbul's two signature Bosphorus bridges have become passable only by vehicles with a mandatory vehicle windscreen-mounted electronic pass, subway and bus tickets in the city have gone electronic, vote tallying in municipal and national elections has become fully computerized, and future plans for mandatory biometric ID cards for all Turkish citizens have been announced by the government.
The ruling "moderate Islamist" AKP party appears to frame these and other e-government initiatives as "keeping step with the times," "keeping step with other major world cities," and "making living safer, easier and more efficient through the targeted use of electronic technology." Its secular critics, on the other hand, argue that everything and everyone under the sun is rapidly becoming electronically trackable thanks to the omnipresence of mobile phones and gratuitous overuse of these installed electronic systems, and that these systems will, eventually, form a dense surveillance grid that could turn daily life for Turks (and secular Turks critical of the current government in particular) into living in a veritable Big Brother House.
While the article doesn't state it outright, it would appear likely that the outdoor face recognition system, if "successful," will be expanded to other crowded areas of Istanbul as well, which has already seen a dazzling increase in the number of installed plain-vanilla (non face-recognizing) CCTV cameras in recent years. This comes after Istanbul's two signature Bosphorus bridges have become passable only by vehicles with a mandatory vehicle windscreen-mounted electronic pass, subway and bus tickets in the city have gone electronic, vote tallying in municipal and national elections has become fully computerized, and future plans for mandatory biometric ID cards for all Turkish citizens have been announced by the government.
The ruling "moderate Islamist" AKP party appears to frame these and other e-government initiatives as "keeping step with the times," "keeping step with other major world cities," and "making living safer, easier and more efficient through the targeted use of electronic technology." Its secular critics, on the other hand, argue that everything and everyone under the sun is rapidly becoming electronically trackable thanks to the omnipresence of mobile phones and gratuitous overuse of these installed electronic systems, and that these systems will, eventually, form a dense surveillance grid that could turn daily life for Turks (and secular Turks critical of the current government in particular) into living in a veritable Big Brother House.
...64 wirelessly controlled, tamper-proof face-recognition cameras...
Sorry, but that's an oxymoron. It may be tamper-resistant (and some wireless devices have pretty good tamper resistance), but nothing that can be controlled wirelessly is tamper proof. Especially not when even the entity that has legitimate access (presumably the Turkish government) is entirely trustworthy to begin with.
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Sometimes technologies inevitably, if deployed, will be abused. Some technologies are too powerful to be in anybody's hands. Power corrupts, and all that.
...to add to their massive data mining efforts. I can't even imagine the possibilities.
If they do, I hope for our sake it turns out better than their translations.
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For great justice.
What's scary is that even with excellent success rates, that's going to be a lot of misfires. 15,000 faces/sec is 54 million faces an hour. At 'five nines' accuracy (which is far beyond what facial recognition can do as yet) that's still 540 false IDs per hour. It'd really suck to be one of those 540.
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0.6% seems like a good ballpark figure for false positives.This research paper claims 0.6%. This article says "Commercial facial recognition technology ... had a 1 percent false positive rate."
15000 faces/sec * 0.6% false positives = 90 false positives per second.
How many cops does it take to ask 90 people per second to come to the police station to answer a few questions? How many busses does it take to take 90 people per second to the police station?
Once they get there, if it takes five minutes to look at each suspect's papers, run them through the computer, and clear them, that police station waiting room will need to be big enough to hold 27,000 people.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You're assuming every second that it rescans the crowd and does 15,000 new recognitions. More likely it scans the crowd constantly, and adds new faces to its database and continues to refine images on existing faces, tracking their movements to handle the interface between one camera and another.
it will be intressting to see if it really leads to an 1984 big brother state, or will actually lead to superiour crime fighting.
The problem is, most real crimes are rare and occur mostly in uninhabited or lower-class areas. This isn't going to stop murders, rape, major theft, etc. all the while eroding privacy. The summary mentions pickpocketing, pickpocketing is hardly observable in a crowd of people, I doubt these cameras would be able to track down the crime itself. Then there is the problem of false matches. A lot of people look remarkably alike in facial structure but look different in other areas that may or may not be tracked by this camera. For example, skin, eye, hair, etc. can often be the difference between a false match or a correct one. Machines though either rely on this too much (hair can easily be changed making it useless) or not enough (two people looking totally different with side-by-side comparisons but may have same facial structure), then some things can change in different lighting environments, etc.
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The point is to catch criminals.
What good is catching them if your penal system releases them back into society without reforming them? Most developed countries don't seem to have a problem catching criminals. The problem seems to be keeping them behind bars and/or showing them the error of their ways so that they don't commit more crimes upon their release.
I'm skeptical that a fancy camera system is going to change this underlying problem.
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We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.