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US Intelligence Wants To Radically Advance Facial Recognition Software
coondoggie writes "Identifying people from video streams or boatloads of images can be a daunting task for humans and computers. But a 4-year development program set to start in April 2014 known as Janus aims to develop software and algorithms that erase those problems and could radically alter the facial recognition world as we know it. Funded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's 'high-risk, high-payoff research' group, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Janus 'seeks to improve face recognition performance using representations developed from real-world video and images instead of from calibrated and constrained collections.'"
absolutely nothing happened these past five months.
What!? They were not using TV channels for development all this time?
is anyone else so incredibly surprised by this as i am? -_-
article modded down "DUH!"
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The sale of masks, hoodies and other feature obscuring items rose 1000%.
US Gov seeks to introduce a ban on all such items ASAP.
A spokesperson said basically, 'Think of all the children that can be saved from nasty people who hide their faces and scare the poor dears'.
A Patriot Act order closing to a website that identified the exact location of every facial recognition camera in the country was issued today
The Terrorist group 'Anonymous' started attacking the cameras themselves causing every picture that they sent to be changed into members of Congress, the house and senior Whitehouse staffers.
And so the war on freedom continues.
Is that a SWAT team I hear pulling up outside? Time to go...
Can't wait to live in a dystopia.
NSA know they can't rely on Fffacebook fffan crowd-sourcing to do the identification of people in images for ever. Always looking to the future.
In the meantime they're testing a new scam through Stanford - worried about what metadata reveals? - give your Fffacebook and phone records to Stanford and they'll prove it's a dumb move. Yes really!
Water is wet and the sky is blue.
Now that the NSA has all that data it makes sense to want to use it better. Having better facials recognition seems like a great idea, you'll have less false positives and faster finding of criminals.
The problem is that they have tons of data they should not have and i'ts not even usefull. The way it's most likely to be used is when something bad happens they can profile everyone and with enough data there is always someone who has behaved suspicious in some way, even though they had nothing to do with it. Guilty until proven innocent.
I've worked with current facial recognition systems and they're absolutely junk. They can match mug shots with perfect lighting but that's about all. It's a very long way to being able to pick people out of some crappy live video stream.
Mind, I worked with whatever's publicly available; maybe the various big brother agencies have better stuff; i wouldn't bet on it though.
Get out now while you still can. Your only option seems to be to bleed your gov dry of all money since you are too big of pussies to do the right thing and execute every one of those corrupt sacks of shit, so tax deprivation seems to be your only hope. Do it now.
This is inevitable.
You need to continually track people's localized movements to reduce the total search space while obtaining multiple images of each person while they move; merging multiple images to get higher resolution images, over time (wind, rain, lipstic, changed hat, etc) all affect confidence, and then eventually match that to a known database of people.
Eventually, correlating time to location, credit card purchases, and cell phone, you'll have a perfect match. Your phone linked to email addresses will link your online identity and bam you get a full picture.
Of course, everyone who is not matched by this is a suspicious character since you're not in the database. Even sudden changes in appearance would signal suspicous behavior... why did you just put on a wig. Biggest trouble this database will have will be girls going to hair salons.
As someone from the US, you should eventually be in the database from birth. Anyone new, travelling from overseas will be suspicious. That doesnt mean its local to the US. With credit card databases, a few outsourced security firms and security cams globally monitored, you'll be tracked everywhere.
Who you meet for coffee, etc. Actually, that is the objective. Find who you meet for coffee.
Its going to happen because I can think about how to do this, so its possible.
For similar reasons as described in https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/criminal_intent.html it will not be usefull.
Is this a bad thing? I can see a legitimate application for this, as long as the US doesn't follow the UK "camera on every corner to protect the kiddies" philosophy.
We should recognise that Snowden's leaks are good, but don't throw common sense out of the window.
Get Poser, or something similar, and start replacing the face picks of all your contacts with pics of poser models asses selected for a best match to the contact's ass. Remember to find an appropriate image for companies and agencies. I'm thinking a Hydra would be appropriate for the NSA, Medusa for the FBI, Mantis for the CIA, etc.
Bonus points for doing r/g stereo of the images, or 3d if the phone supports that directly.
You never know...
...and shove it up your Janus.
That is all.
Automated drone strikes all over the U.S.A. based on the output of the surveillance cameras?
Boy, do I feel safer now.
Google Face Search isn't good enough? Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful! Doesn't Google have everyone's face already?
That seems contradictive.
I think they saw this picture last week, and a little light bulb popped up in their little heads.
http://www.businessinsider.com/crazy-photo-appears-to-show-60-security-cameras-on-one-intersection-in-china-2013-11
NSA Man 1: "Did you see those 60 CCTV cameras on a Chinese junction?"
NSA Man 2: "What would happen if we could intercept all those IP CCTV camera feeds and stuck facial recognition on them. Then we could monitor all 300 million potential terrorists!"
NSA Man 1: "Wow that is so constitutional, I'm glad we are the good guys"
Go, US Intelligence!
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I've worked with current facial recognition systems and they're absolutely junk. They can match mug shots with perfect lighting but that's about all. It's a very long way to being able to pick people out of some crappy live video stream. Mind, I worked with whatever's publicly available; maybe the various big brother agencies have better stuff; i wouldn't bet on it though.
A while ago I did a little research in computer vision. From the summary it seems like nothing more than moving a project from an academic project to a real world project.
In the academic world it is perfectly acceptable to use carefully selected or crafted inputs (facial images in this case) to develop and evaluate your algorithms. You may have separate date sets for development and evaluation, however careful selection or crafting is OK to simplify the project and avoid issues/variables outside of the project's scope. In your particular mugshot example this would be using images of good resolution and good/predictable lighting. Dealing with low resolution and bad lighting would be an issue left to the next thesis or research grant or for commercialization.
Working with mugshots may be a fluke, the inputs happen to be carefully crafted like one might do in academic research. So it was relatively simple to transition to this niche real world application.
Moving to a general real world solution using images and video of questionable quality is an enormous jump in the level of difficulty. Perhaps too difficult. It may not be possible to recognize an individual. It may only be possible to offer a somewhat generalized characterization that a person my fit into. At least with the haphazardly placed cameras typically found on the streets and in shops today. Some places use very good and carefully positioned cameras to get decent images for automated facial recognition. For example Las Vegas casinos.
It's like absolutely no one can figure out how the hell we got here
While you may not be able to figure out what had happened, they sure do.
They had that planned all along, and they have greased all the palms that needed to be greased - from the politicians (from both sides of the aisle) to the corporate CEOs - that is how they got their PRISM (among all their many other_It's like absolutely no one can figure out how the hell we got here) schemes launched without anyone beating an eyelid.
Had it not because of a courageous squeeky wheel, ~ Edward Snowden, ~ they could have accomplished EVEN MORE !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Perhaps it's time to rund around like this.
I'm considering it in earnest. Sheesh. To think that I'm paying taxes to support this is really revolting.
The false positive problem is going to become a real nightmare for some unfortunate individuals accused of crimes based on incorrect identification by this system, especially if it gains enough traction in courts of law and enough precedent is established. You could also envision a scenario where certain unsavory types end up gaming the system to frame others for their crimes.
On one hand it's just a tool which can be used for good or ill. Unfortunately for the average citizen, law enforcement has a tendency to use all of the tools at its disposal against you in a court of law.
Is that when it comes to their work, they are essentially amoral. The likely use of a technology is secondary to the intellectual challenges posed by a scientific or engineering problem. The main thing is that a problem is "neat". Throw in a little bit of competition to get hearts racing and all managers have to do is sit back and wait for results. Thus we get crossbows, machine guns, nerve gas, nuclear warheads, smart bombs, mortgage-backed securities and surveillance systems. How many of the people who built these clevilish devices ever stopped to ask themselves: should I be doing this?. Maybe quite a few, but it still didn't stop most of them.
Sadly, I think this situation is unavoidable, for you always encounter the argument: "better that we build it before somebody else does". Which I suppose is a valid point: in this world it's either fuck or be fucked, and morality don't enter into it. If only I hadn't been raised on a steady diet of moral platitudes and stories of good triumphing over evil, I could be more at peace with this reality.
Sad to say, it is already a crime in the UK to wear a facemask if a policeman asks you to remove it.
Jacqui Smith was such a people hating cow.
They already have a perfect baseline of your facial characteristics, just look at your drive's license, or "liquor ID card" (for those that lost their license) or even your passport (if you have one.) It makes the algorithms "so much more accurate!" or "very nearly fool proof!" (read both: sarcasm (for the coming election campaigns) and as reality.)
Sadly, I have a driver's license, three gun permits (3 different states with photo), a passport and more.
FB users.... you now have my permission to tag away in those photos that I am I'm in the background of, it's w-a-y too late for me..
Tag: Save our children! Vote them ALL out now. Right here. Right now.
Smell the Freedom(TM)!
Unable to invent ideas for themselves, they name the project after Judge Dredd... (And not a very good film, at that)
As long as they contribute it to iPhoto I'm game.
Oh no, now I'll have to import advanced technology from England called a handkerchief for when I walk around.
I bet good and comfortable masks will be in demand.
No obscuring your face, it's the law.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Anyone else reading that as "US Has Radically Advanced Facial Recognition Software, Wants To Phase In Use In Unclassified Programs In 2014-2018"?
Or has my Snowden Cynicism gone too far?
0 1 - just my two bits
Slashed Otters agree... if it doesn't make it through the media filter of relevance, it didn't happen, and therefore it becomes insightful to claim that the screen before us is congruent with all that is surrounds us. [ :-( ]
The realization and response to Climate Change has clearly peaked and 350.org has gone silent, nothing has changed in the EU, or the BRIC economies, the T-Pottie is over, GE food deserves its industrial and health camouflage (so say the cleansed mind voters of Washington state), and oceans and all their fisheries have magically rebounded from their industrial abuse, and neither Nature or Science have been able to successfully vet any new or important research.
Yep, it's clearly insightful to assert that nothing happened...
Faces? Why only Faces? It would be fantastic is software could look at an image and identify everything in it. Ignoring the Sherlock Homes navel gazing stuff; computers could be used to look at things and offer help to average person. One thing right off the bat is lost items, like misplaced keys, and dropped items like kids socks. I'm certain that there is a lot of down time that the NSA's computers are just standing idle, use the cycles to find ways to make everyday americans life easier. Nobody wants to get creeped out, but if there is a lost dog, or lost bag? And if the marathons are going to be watched, how about having the computer send a message to the runner that if that person changes some aspect of their running, they would use less energy? You know, stuff that doesn't creep people out.
Of course there's the camera looking a someone that appears to need a bra, and that person gets a text about a sale going on at Victoria's Secret, but it's some old fat guy; now I'm creeped out.
Why let Hollywood decide what modern freedom fighters look like?
There's the things that are flat out impossible for them to abuse, and then all the things that they abuse.
It's already been done, I saw it in a movie once.
a java software project aimed at identifying the those who express their disdain for security cameras through the age-old art of 'mooning.' Hence the name "jAnus."