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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.
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...
Having better facials recognition seems like a great idea
The technology may be impressive, but the government must be stopped from using it to further violate people's privacy.
and i'ts not even usefull.
The ability to harass practically anyone will likely prove quite useful to the government.
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.
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.
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...
Dehydrated water isn't anything.
Thirty four characters live here.
Is this a bad thing?
I don't think the technology itself is bad, but I also believe anyone with a brain knows it's going to be misused, and that's probably what people are afraid of.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
and i'ts not even usefull.
The ability to harass practically anyone will likely prove quite useful to the government.
Wow. And here I thought they had enough shit online tracking us today, along with the manipulative control to harass citizens (you won a free tax audit based on your party affiliation!) at the Federal level. What the hell was I thinking. Clearly the NSA budget is lacking. Yes, we need more of that. I'm sure that's the answer.
What's that? The average citizen unknowingly commits three felonies a day you say? And the government wants even more visibility into that? What could possibly go wrong?
The only real way to remove our current government would be if the military did it.
Which wouldn't be so bad, so long as they don't try to run it. Throw all the current leaders out, call for new elections in 6 months, it would be a start anyway.
You could say the same thing about a fork
Perhaps you should try to understand what I'm saying before you spew forth such things. A fork is wildly different from technology that will, in all likelihood, be used to aid in the violation of people's rights; history tells me it's an inevitability.
I also did not suggest a ban on the technology itself. I would not mind severely limiting the government's use of it, though.
We shouldn't fear potential abuse
I think that's an absolutely absurd statement. When talking about whether a government should have a certain power or not, I think it is very important to take into account how likely it is to abuse that power, how easy it is to abuse it, and how much it could be used to infringe upon people's liberties.
We should fear a lack of moderation and oversight.
We've all already seen how the government's oversight works; it simply doesn't.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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"
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 !
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.