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Japanese CCTV Camera Can Scan 36 Million Faces/Second

Posted by timothy on from the once-met-alex-jones-at-mt-carmel-compound dept.

An of-course anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the always-fun Infowars.com: "A new camera technology from Hitachi Hokusai Electric can scan days of camera footage instantly, and find any face which has EVER walked past it. Its makers boast that it can scan 36 million faces per second. The technology raises the spectre of governments – or other organisations – being able to 'find' anyone instantly simply using a passport photo or a Facebook profile. The 'trick' is that the camera 'processes' faces as it records, so that all faces which pass in front of it are recorded and stored instantly. Faces are stored as a searchable 'biometric' record, placing the unique mathematical 'faceprint' of anyone who has ever walked past the camera in a database."

16 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. The future by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And here I was thinkin' that the level of surveillance seen in GITS wouldn't be seen in my lifetime...

    1. Re:The future by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Ghost In The Shell.

    2. Re:The future by next_ghost · · Score: 2

      Wearing Guy Fawkes mask on the street all the time suddenly seems like a VERY good idea...

    3. Re:The future by Internetuser1248 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There are alternatives if you don't want to wear a mask. Some of these are also less likely to get you hassled by the police. Someone should make a version of these face paint techniques that uses national flags and national team colours, then everyone will just assume you are a sports fan.

    4. Re:The future by OeLeWaPpErKe · · Score: 2

      First you're not actually allowed to walk the streets when it's impossible to identify you. Walking around in masks is an offence just about everywhere in the world (yes, even in Saudi Arabia walking around in a full niqab is not technically allowed, and people have been arrested for it (why ? well, guy in niqab blows up bank, runs outside, and they just rounded up everyone in those clothes. They didn't even catch the guy). In normal states it's not allowed and the police will not tolerate real obscuring masks under normal circumstances for obvious reasons. Furthermore, if a crime is comitted and you're walking around with a mask, good luck explaining that). Due to the history of laws, there's an exception : it's allowed on carnival. But that's pretty much it.

      And even masks and such won't work. When it becomes trivial to do this, it will make sense, and everybody will do this, without informing government or employees. Why not ? Who's going to stop them ?

      Enforcing privacy is about to become the same sort of fight as enforcing copyright is for the MPAA. There's laws protecting the "victims", who suffer no damage and can't even know if their rights have been violated, but it's impossible to use those laws due to realities on the ground.

      Even now one can read articles from hackers about how it's completely ludicrous to expect privacy in a place where you can expect cameras (what ? I can't run opencv on my own webcam ?). You can film people on/near your property, but you "can't" actually look at the film that's stored on your harddrive ? Why not ? Why can't an algorithm look at it ?

      Get ready for a hopeless fight in 3 ... 2 ... 1.

      Btw guy fawkes masks will only buy time until the resolution on these cameras is high enough. There's plenty of biometrically identifying information on a human body, some of which is near impossible to hide. The exact ratio of the distances between the circle joints in the human body is as unique as a fingerprint, and can be determined from a short movie. The algorithm has a hard part, which is identifying your limbs and head and how they move over a few seconds of video, and an easy part, which is basically drawing all the connections between the rotation points of those joins (ie. a 5-polygon and it's diagonals), then measure the ratios 2-by-2, you then sort them according to size so it doesn't even matter if the guy was upside down or hopping on a pogo stick, or managed to convince the camera his leg was really his head. As long as the camera can get decent hints about your limbs and head moving (the big ones) it can find this. Masks are a useless defense, in fact they make things easier by providing static reference points on your face. Not even long skirts work against it.

  2. Misleading Headline... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    "The trick is that the camera processes faces as it records, so that all faces which pass in front of it are recorded and stored instantly. Faces are stored as a searchable biometric record"

    So basically it search for a record in a sorted list of up to 36 million records in under a second? Not exactly revolutionary...

    1. Re:Misleading Headline... by yfkar · · Score: 3, Informative
      I wondered about the headline too. My first thought was that how on Earth could you get 36 million people to fit into one second of footage AND process it in real time. Even the article wasn't very clear about it.

      Also:

      Faces are stored as a searchable 'biometric' record, storing the unique

      It seems that the writer of the article didn't even bother to

    2. Re:Misleading Headline... by RNLockwood · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I agree but it searches for a set of records that have some kind of a close match and doesn't stop with the first "hit" a la CSI.

      Wonder why there was no mention of the false positive and false negative rates? Perhaps they are a little too high?

      --
      Nate
  3. Smile! You're on Creepy Camera! by Cazekiel · · Score: 3, Funny

    If I lived in Japan, I'd walk around with THE stupidest smile ever, eyes wide as saucers, pretending that everything I'm looking at is the most fascinating thing in the universe. I mean, I do this ALREADY, but I'd up the ante severely, all so I can imagine officials watching the surveillance tapes muttering, "WTF is this chick on?"

    --
    You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
  4. No expectation of privacy by cpu6502 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In a public area.

    So maybe it's time to amend the Constitution. "The government or its agents shall not track people's whereabouts, except when a warrant has been obtained through a judge, and supported by oath or affirmation."

    --
    My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
  5. Re:Won't work for smart criminals/terrorists by nurb432 · · Score: 2

    Mustache and goatee removal ( or adding ) wont fool modern facial recognition software.

    It might fool software from 10 years ago, but things have advanced, quite a bit.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  6. The headline is wrong!! by jklovanc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Come on editors do your job. The headline is "Japanese CCTV Camera Can Scan 36 Million Faces/Second". That is not even close to what this system is doing. System does the following;
    1. creates a thumbnail picture of the face. How long this takes is not noted.
    2. Searches a database for matches. This is where the 36 Million faces/second comes in and is not done by the camera at all.

    A better headline would have been "Japanese CCTV Camera Can Search Through 36 Million Faces/Second". That is a much less impressive feat than scanning as it is just a way of encoding a face for faster searches.

  7. Re:Won't work for smart criminals/terrorists by Gaygirlie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Indeed. However, there are still ways of fooling them with makeup and a few bits of silicone, and both are easy to apply and take off. For example adding a wee bit of skin-coloured silicone on your cheekbones and forehead totally changes how you look. Then apply some slightly darker blush on your cheeks and eyesockets and you'll look like an entirely different person. Then just wipe the makeup on your sleeve, pick the silicone off with your fingers and you'll be your old self in less than 30 seconds.

  8. For pete's sake, can we get a decent source by jfengel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The link is to a paranoid source (Infowars), citing a disreputable newspaper (The Daily Mail), citing (but not linking to) a press release, for a product which the abysmally sketchy article is available "within the next tax year". None of which even begins to mention its actual capabilities beyond the misrepresented data point of "scanning 36 million faces".

    In other words, unless somebody has a link to something of value, the entire thing seems like fiction designed to give people something to be pleasantly outraged about on a Saturday afternoon.

    1. Re:For pete's sake, can we get a decent source by MobileC · · Score: 2

      The entire thing seems like fiction designed to give people something to be pleasantly outraged about on a Saturday afternoon.

      Works for me. Although it's Sunday here...

      --

      Fran
      :):):)
      1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!

  9. That's an easy one to solve by MaxToTheMax · · Score: 2

    Guy Fawkes masks. Everyone should start wearing Guy Fawkes masks.