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US Intelligence Wants To Radically Advance Facial Recognition Software

Posted by samzenpus on from the who-are-you dept.

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.'"

6 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. It's like by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    absolutely nothing happened these past five months.

    1. Re:It's like by duke_cheetah2003 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Snowden told us all something that we already knew, so nothing changed there.

      Just to be clear, Snowden told us something we all suspected, perhaps even strongly suspected as in almost accepted truth. But Snowden revealed these things we suspected. Concrete and clear, no doubts left.

  2. In other news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:In other news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Good reason to adopt the Muslim religion... You get to wear a burka!

  3. Inevitable by Tim12s · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Will not work. Period. by fluch · · Score: 5, Informative

    For similar reasons as described in https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/criminal_intent.html it will not be usefull.