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Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn't Help Find Bombing Suspects
SternisheFan writes "ArsTechnica reports: 'While the whole country is relieved that this past week's Boston Marathon bombing ordeal and subsequent lockdown of the city is finally over, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Washington Post that the department's facial recognition system "did not identify" the two bombing suspects. "The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs' images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver's license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation," the Post reported on Saturday. Facial recognition systems can have limited utility when a grainy, low-resolution image captured at a distance from a cellphone camera or surveillance video is compared with a known, high-quality image. Meanwhile, the FBI is expected to release a large-scale facial recognition apparatus "next year for members of the Western Identification Network, a consortium of police agencies in California and eight other Western states," according to the San Jose Mercury News. Still, video surveillance did prove extremely useful in pinpointing the suspects.'"
Rinse and repeat
.. use Google Picasa :D
Computers are not magic.
Can anyone explain the presence of Craft International (Security Contractors) at the marathon?
Do Security Contractors frequently monitor events like this?
The correct procedure when the images are small and grainy is to magnify them and then use imaging processing software such as photo shop to bring out details. This only takes a few seconds. MI5 and CSI, have had really good success with this for years and Hollywood for decades.
If I'm not mistaken, the CCTV footage was not as useful... what did help was the one man who took a picture of the bomber (unbeknownst to him at the time), and more importantly, the unfortunate man whose legs were blown off at the knees who valiantly gave an ID from his hospital bed.
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I'd replace it with a Twitter and Facebook page. 100 million humans have been known to beat a computer at facial recognition, especially when clothes and circumstances are added in.
Pinpointing the suspect's what?
Oh wait, that's grammatically correct. It's a sad day when I start imagining /. grammar mistakes that aren't actually there.
The surveillance footage probably helped identify the bombers. But they were initially apprehended by an MIT campus security officer and while he may well have known who to look for it was his training and bravery that made the most significant impact in this case. So questions about the value of CCTV and other tech to one side, we mustn't forget there is a very important human element in amongst all. I kind of feel it is imporatnt to not lose sight of this.
How can we expect computers to make a proper match when people can't even accomplish the task? The internet was quick to point the finger to Sunil Tripathi, and all they ended up doing was cause unnecessary pain for the family of a missing person.
Gotta wonder if it picked up matches for random people who are wanted for one thing or another, and if there will be follow-up investigations on those leads.
And if so, if crowd-scanning will become a precedent...
"Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn't Help Find Bombing Suspects"
Thousands of paramilitary, guns, Humvees, helicopters, robots, hours and hours of lockdown of millions of people and the suspect went uncaught.
A homeowner on a smoke break finds him.
Who the fuck cares about facial recognition, I say arm the citizens and save money and time.
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What fucking use is a tech site that can't even update their certificates?
Not really a fan of this technology - but my thought is this would be a good place to work on fine-tuning the system to increase the effectiveness. You have several RL image sources/raw footage and know what the result should be... time to work on debugging.
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Is anyone else getting a warning about an expired ssl cert from this site? Or am I the target of a MITM attack?
Current-generation face-recognition systems have a false positive rate of about 1 in 1,000 even when they have excellent images to work with -- high-resolution, well-lit, full-face frontal photos with no obscuring hats, glasses, etc. So even if CCTVs captured excellent images, if you're searching a database of tens of millions you're going to get a lot of matches. In a case like the Boston bombing it's okay if you get a few thousand hits because there is manpower available to sort through and narrow those down to the dozens which the (much more accurate) human eye/brain can't distinguish, and then there's manpower available to chase down each of those leads.
When you reduce the image quality, though, make it grainy, at an angle, poorly lit, and throw in some baseball caps... forget it. You have to reduce the match threshold, and then instead of thousands of candidate matches, you have tens or hundreds of thousands. For that matter, consider the fact that humans can't deal well with those constraints, and we're social animals who devote a significant portion of our enormous brain capacity to exactly this task.
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I have loaded some 45000 pictures, almost all family pics, on to Picasa. Once I identify a face and tag it, it finds the same face in other photos. And as I mark yes/no for its findings, it improves remarkably. It is not confused by heavy make up worn by Bharatnatyam dancers. It is finding the correct faces of 20 such dancers lined up facing the camera. It picks faces obscured in dark backgrounds, in out of focus pictures, faces occupying hardly 50 x 50 pixels. Faces at all orientations, including upside down. Half faces, faces with just one eye... It is really amazing.
What is amazing is its mistakes. It mistakes mother for daughter and vice versa. Confuses brothers with sisters when they are toddlers but not when they are teens or adults.
But this is forward match, going from a known face and looking for it in a crowd. Boston police is trying the reverse look up on a massive scale. It failed today. But like Lycos and webcrawler being upstaged when Google solved the reverse look up problem, some day the reverse look up problem will be solved. With parallel technology? Through GPU's running million forward searches simultaneously? But someday soon, the reverse look up will be solved and the automatic photo identification will work.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Facial recognition tech did help. It's a mature technology that's been in use for 100,000 years or more....
So if the system doesn't actually catch bad guys, why do they still have it? Did they not save their sales receipt from spending all those tax dollars?
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What people don't understand is that for facial recognition software to work you have to have good quality cameras, images, a more static environment. This is why you hear about it being used in casinos is Las Vegas and elsewhere. In those environments you have high quality cameras with close range and good angles working against a smaller set of good pictures in a relatively static environment (people in casinos tend to congregate and not move around a lot). You also have staff with a distinct vested interest in watching out for their 'bad guys'.
In a place like a large public venue you have lower quality cameras, far more people running around, worse angles and range and the environment is far more transient. The tool is being used in a completely different environment with far less support and far larger data sets to work with.
It's like taking your Rav4 off-roading the Rubicon trail and coming way with the conclusion that off-roading is a bunch of hype. You've taken the tool (grocery getter) and put it to use for a job it was never meant for. Meanwhile your guy with the old Jeep knows for a fact that his tools works for the job because he uses it for that job on a routine basis, however he would be just as foolish to except his jeep to work as well as a daily grocery getter as a Rav4.
Until the tools are put into environments that allow them to succeed, and with the hardware that they need they will continue to fail. You could call it a failing of the tool, however the tools and hardware are immature. Give it another five years and this would be a very different story. It's just technology advancing and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it short of getting hold of your politician and demanding reforms or limits on it's use.
Are you dim? Perhaps you should answer his question with a fact rather than conjecture.
Why would it be expected to recognize these people? Isnt facial recognition intended to recognize know faces?
Reddit was just a larger version of Maple Street.
http://www.tv.com/shows/the-twilight-zone/the-monsters-are-due-on-maple-street-12606/
Selective enforcement has theoretical problems for democracy. Basically, you pass a law that everyone is guilty of, and then cherry pick who you arrest.
However, the failure of an Orwellian "univeral picasa of security cameras" might be due to some selective process (on which images are loaded) OTHER than incompetence or dereliction of duty.
Conspiracy theories can be ugly, but any business passes the test of "acting in furtherance." Criminal ends make criminal conspiracies illegal.
Why assume that every image is loaded in the database by design?
That's what they WANT you to think...
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
because they didn't explain HOW the pictures were matched against the drivers license database to get their names. Was it people shuffling through tens of thousands of photos or what?
The DVR where I work can only handle 320x240 images, and only 1/sec at that (it is pulling some 24 simultaneous analogue streams however). They are almost useless for recognizing people.
What I haven't found in any of the coverage I read is how exactly the suspects were IDd.
Between the 6pm Thursday press conference when the photos were released, and the next time that I dipped into the media shitstorm (around 8:30am Friday) the suspects had names. How'd that happen? Did someone drop a dime, or was there ID found on the body of the older Tsaernaev?
The cameras they use when I get a drivers license? HD! The cameras they use at TV stations? HD! The cameras they use to make movies? HD! The webcam I have attached to this computer? Crappy VGA! Most cell phone cameras: look like crappy VGA! Most security cameras? Look like crappy VGA! Yes its true folks, most cameras have crappy resolution, or a very small lens diameter, or both, and as a result give grainy crappy pictures. Yes, you too sparky, if your phone/tablet camera has a lens the size of a pencil eraser or smaller, then its crappy too. Its not about miniaturization, its about physics and photons of light, and more look better than less. If the cops image recognition software works only with HD images, then its kind of useless. Store security video is always crappy. Webcam video is crappy. The software must deal with crappy or its useless.
So they identified the suspects by having FBI agents sitting at a monitor and watching video over and over and over.
No, actually. They spent hundreds if not thousands of man-hours looking over the video, and then the guy with his legs blown off came out of sedation and wrote "I know who did it" on a pad, and the FBI was at his beside not longer after, getting a description of events and the suspect.
The witness said one of them plonked the backpack down next to him and walked away. Looked him right in the face. Had he not been run over by his younger brother in the middle of a firefight with police, he would've been guaranteed a death penalty, because there isn't a jury in the world that could do otherwise after hearing his testimony. Golden testimony, too, because after being incapacitated, he hadn't had any exposure to media coverage.
Please help metamoderate.
I maintain my own insurance and everyone else should do the same.
Really? You are buying private health insurance as an individual? Either you are crazy or you are swimming in money or you are being swindled.
The poster you're responding to was clearly being tongue-in-cheek, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-insurance self-insurance can be a lower-cost than purchasing an insurance policy from a firm. Young and healthy people in the US do it all the time even when their employer offers a discounted commercial policy (more young males than young females do so, in part because of the US view that "insurance" should cover preventative care as well as catastrophic care). Part of the "Obamacare" law is aimed squarely at trying to force these people to buy a commercial insurance policy.
My own elderly parents self-insure for dental care because Medicare has such crappy dental plans and discounts for paying cash give them a better deal.
Where's the evidence that made them suspects to begin with? Everybody is chanting "YEAH", but where's the evidence? What evidence actually links them to the deed?
The problem is we keep using the term health `insurance' when we are not buying insurance, we are buying health care coverage.
As you say, `insurance' is supposed to provide compensation when something unexpected happens - a rock breaking your windscreen is unexpected and auto insurance correctly pays for that event. Let's face it, if your `insurance' covers yearly health checkups and monthly prescriptions (e.g. insulin) then you are getting a benefit, not insurance.
Unfortunately, words have power and the terms we use to describe a thing winds up having a large impact on how we view that thing (abortion vs. choice anyone, why isn't that pro-abortion vs. anti-abortion)
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
If only those cameras were as good as the red light cameras popular at busy intersections in many states. But I guess security is usually seen as an expense, where red light cameras are a profit center.
I mean, 20 years ago we had the ability to do this:
http://youtu.be/qHepKd38pr0
and 15 years later, it still has it's uses:
http://youtu.be/KiqkclCJsZs
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Considering that slashdong is like 99% male with an occasional "slashdot vagina," inherent dyslexia is going to make this a hard one to pick up. Good call, ubrgeek!