A Wanted Man in China Has Been Caught Because of Facial Recognition Software (fastcompany.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The man was reportedly caught after facial recognition software running on cameras at a concert identified him, reports AbacusNews. That's despite there being over 50,000 people attending the concert, which took place in Nanchang, China. Law enforcement in the country has increasingly been turning to facial recognition software to surveil the public for persons of interest.

Comments

Are they sure that it's him?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought all Asians looked alike

Re:Are they sure that it's him?

[Metabolife]

Wright Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Are they sure that it's him?

[ganjadude]

who knew?

Re:Are they sure that it's him?

[ShanghaiBill]

I thought all Asians looked alike

Asians think caucasians all look alike. Your brain adjusts to the variation in the types of faces you see on a daily basis. If all your family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances are white, you will have difficulty discriminating between Asian faces. And vice versa.

I live in San Jose, California, which is about 35% Asian, so when I go to Asia I have no problem recognizing individual faces.

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[Type44Q]

Asians think caucasians all look alike. Your brain adjusts to the variation in the types of faces you see on a daily basis.

There is far less genetic variation among East Asians than there is among Caucasians.

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[angel'o'sphere]

There is far less genetic variation among East Asians than there is among Caucasians.
And how exactly do you come to that absurd idea?

Re:Are they sure that it's him?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Asians think caucasians all look alike.

Quite some years ago, I saw Chinese-American actress Rosalind Chao on The Tonight Show. She shared an anecdote about a family reunion she attended back in China. She said she kept getting introduced to relatives she couldn't tell apart - she thought everyone there looked alike!

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[ShanghaiBill]

There is far less genetic variation among East Asians than there is among Caucasians.
And how exactly do you come to that absurd idea?

I can't find a clear citation that East Asians have less diversity than Caucasians, but they certainly have less diversity than Africans.

Humanity's origin appears to be in the Rift Valley region of East Africa. There have been many migrations out of that region, each going through a genetic chokepoint that reduced diversity. The branches, from most genetic divergence from the core region (presumably because of an earlier departure) to the least:

1. San people of the Kalahari.
2. Pygmies of the Congo rainforest
3. Melanesians, Negritos, native Australians, Ainu
4. East Asians, Polynesians, and Native Americans
5. Caucasians
6. West Africans (Bantus)

In East Asian, there is more genetic diversity in Southeast Asia than further north in China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia. Presumably, this is because they migrated from South to North.

Re:Are they sure that it's him?

[rtb61]

Reality is 'they all look alike', is inherently racist and prejudiced, full stop. They all look alike because you pay less attention to their appearance, they are not individuals, they are one of them, the them bit is what ever can be used to make them stand out to isolate them, to give you a competitive advantage over all of them. Guilt also plays a part, you no longer recognising them as individuals, just a lesser group, you don't want to recognise them individually and associate your poor behaviour with actual individual people, they are just a mass of undesirables, what you want to believe to exploit that competitive advantage of not being one of them.

The lack of recognition is an active choice, you don't want to recognise them as individuals. You do recognise them because you see them as individuals, just like anyone else you look at.

Re:Are they sure that it's him?

[ShanghaiBill]

Reality is 'they all look alike', is inherently racist and prejudiced, full stop.

Bullcrap. Reality is that people have a hard time discriminating between faces when none of them are similar to what they are used to. That isn't "prejudice", it is just a fact.

I grew up in Tennessee, and first went to Asia as an 18 year old Marine. I had met very few Asians while growing up, and I had difficulty telling them apart despite trying hard to do so. When I left a year later, I could recognize Asian individuals easily, and I was on a first name basis with several dozen locals (in Henoko, Okinawa if anyone cares). This has nothing to do with being "prejudiced" or not thinking of them as individuals. My brain just needed time to adjust to a change in my environment.

Today, I have Asian neighbors, Asian coworkers, ... and an Asian wife. I can immediately recognize differences between Asians just as easily as Caucasians. Because that is what I am familiar with.

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[Type44Q]

I read.

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[Type44Q]

So you haven't done any reading on the subject.

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[Type44Q]

Human migration (or lack thereof); it's really not complicated.

And if you'd done any reading on the subject, you'd know that those with the least genetic variation of all are the Japanese, due to having little contact with the outside world for thousands of years.

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[Type44Q]

This is certainly true now but I suspect that historically, it's due to isolation more than anything else but it may very well have morphed into a cultural tendency...

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[angel'o'sphere]

Well,
the ideas who moved from where to where and what was settled when change every few years.
E.g. that japan is to isolated can not really be hold up. They traveled to China and Korea since millennia.
And they have a strong intermixing with the settler waves or invaders that reached them.
That is probably true for every area of the world.

Really isolated would probably be people like the Inuit, some in the high regions of the Himalaya or Aleuts etc.

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[Hognoxious]

It's well known that Europeans have less genetic variation than Africans, possibly due to a population bottleneck during the ice age, so I don't see why the suggestion is absurd.

Re: Are they sure that it's him?

[angel'o'sphere]

It is actually not well known.
And on the first glance, I have no idea on what base that would be possible. How would you even measure it?

Impossiblu!

[Kenja]

They told us time and again that the cameras they put everywhere were too high up to be used for facial recognition.

Re:Impossiblu!

[Jeremi]

They told us time and again that the cameras they put everywhere were too high up to be used for facial recognition.

The Chinese government told you that?

Did they send you a certified letter, or just drop by your house to announce it over tea?

Since when did the Chinese government care about your privacy concerns, one way or the other, even enough to lie about their intentions?

Re:Impossiblu!

[SuperKendall]

I thought the Chinese's explicitly said they were using face tracking on a massive scale. Perhaps you are thinking about other countries that lie about what they do with surveillance cameras.

Re:Impossiblu!

[Peter P Peters]

They told us time and again that the cameras they put everywhere were too high up to be used for facial recognition.

Who said that and when? They just had a show on one of the magazine shows on TV about the latest gen cameras installed at our city football stadium. They are mounted on the flood-light poles and have enough resolution to do facial recognition of every person on the opposite grandstand (ie 20000+ people). They showed the demo on TV and said they're already using it to remove known hooligans who already have bans from previous offences. The surveillance state is already here.

Re:In soviet Russia

[Mr D from 63]

I do wonder how many false alerts they got along the way.

And?

[Imazalil]

Are things so bad that 'works as advertised' is worthy of a news story?

If only those 50,000 people attending the concert would have to go through some kind of a gate system by which they would trickle through making it easy to identify then a handful at a time. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will figure out such a system, they might even realize they could use it to see if people should be allowed in at the same time. Maybe give out tokens or tickets or something. Or go all web 2.0 and use one of them new-fangled "app" things.

Re:And?

[barc0001]

It's worthy of a news story because the environment that this facial recognition did its job in and "worked as advertised" is a massively challenging problem for this type of system. It's also worthy of a news story because it is a harbinger of more to come like this, and not just in China. As this tech gets better, agencies will be able to track everyone's movements in public 24/7 and store all of it for unknown purposes. Today it's criminals, tomorrow it's people on no fly lists (rightly or wrongly) getting "randomly" stopped, the day after it's persons of interest, and so it goes. Eventually everyone will become used to having an invisible boot on their neck.

Re:And?

[AHuxley]

AC facial recognition has always been that good and that fast.
Big numbers of people in a database was never a problem for facial recognition.
Searching a big database for a few sets of numbers is something computer designers got good at over time.
The only thing that held facial recognition back for a while was camera quality and images from the side of a face, looking up and down.
Once a nation invests in a good network camera system it can track all faces. The US uses such networks to look at all drivers and passengers along some main roads. Every face and licence plate is kept on a database. The difference is such data is never talked about in open court as parallel construction protects such methods all over the US.

The news from China shows the system works. The news from the US is the system has been working well for many years.

decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

riots are in part encouraged by the perceived lack of consequences to any individual in the riot due to there being too many people.

camera shutter clicks...

Face Rec scrubs image after image... wide angel shots...

police marquee select clouds of names for people standing in the "wrong" area... names get court summons sent to their registered addresses.

To this people say "masks"... sure masks... I'm sure the police have no solution for that idea.

Given that the bike lock guy was found, I'd take that very lightly.

We need more peaceful protests... sit ins... something you really can't get in trouble for... the violent aggressive stuff is toxic. And in the end, society at large won't be on your side when the hammer comes down.

Re:decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

Sure... Burn it down.

Anarchy is self defeating.

Anarchy leads to tyranny because in the anarchy you create an opportunity for an absolute ruler. We can see this pretty much any time anarchy has been tried. It leads almost immediately to a tyrant. It doesn't matter which ideology you follow... communist fascist whatever... you create anarchy and you're going to get a tyrant.

If you want a tyrant, create anarchy.

Once you understand that it isn't as easy as saying "its just the system, man"... you understand that the path to liberty requires maintaining these institutions and guarding them from corruption.

Absent the institutions we have tyranny.
Absent moderation of the institutions we have tyranny.

You have to moderate them. Its not easy. Its really hard. And while you are doing it many players will whisper in your ear to pervert them to service one end or another. But those roads all lead to tyranny.

I am increasingly of the opinion that there are a lot of people that deserve to live in oppression and possibly starve enough to eat their own cats.

Why? Because there isn't enough respect for the consequences of fucking up the system.

People want things for free. People want to eat the golden goose. People want the rules to only apply when they apply to someone else. People want democracy that only does what their dear leader says.

These contradictions are death. Literal... death. And I'm tired of arguing with people about it. I think they should get the fruits of their ambitions. A whole lot of people should just be allowed to kill themselves with their own bad ideas.

Re:decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

why did I reference sit ins if I am ignoring agent provocateurs?

You do realize the entire point of a sit in is to prevent that sort of thing?

If everyone is sitting down, how do you "agent provocateur"?

Just schedule a protest, have everyone show up with water and food for themselves. And then sit down. Everyone sits down.

The cops will generally leave you alone because you pose no particular threat and the optics of a police officer messing with peaceful people sitting down is terrible.

Disruptors can't blend into the crowd or do violent stuff and then run away because the actual protestors are all sitting down. There is no crowd to blend into.

This is not hard. But lets not pretend that these protests are only turning violent by accident. People are showing up to them with weapons, body armor, etc. They want a fight.

Organize and then sit down. You'll have no trouble. Its really really easy. And the groups that don't do that and have problems are either too stupid to do something so easy or lying about wanting no violence. Because its that easy. Sit down.

Re:decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

Sure, Martin Luther King's peaceful sitins were of no value. It was just the violence. /s

The ends are the means, brah. If your means are violence then your ends will be violence. You can see the scars left on communities by people that didn't care what the consequences would be for those families and businesses.

Your solution is "hellfire"... the fire that burns and leaves nothing but ash. You'll build nothing with that. You'll leave nothing but ruin in your wake which those that live in the ashes will have to deal with...

What city do you live in? What neighborhood? Imagine it burned. Imagine the stores with the windows blow out and boarded up. Imagine there being no hope of it being rebuilt because the people that would do the rebuilding have left.

Those are the fruits of your violence. Look at Detroit. Where is the inflection point that turned them from the most wealthy per capita city in the US to a wasteland of run down crack houses?

Want to live in Ferguson?

The world you are proposing to create is not worth living in. It is full of ruin, hopelessness, and decay.

If you want to go somewhere positive then you need to create... not destroy. If you can't even contemplate how that would work then you're the last person to be advising anything.

Re:decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

occupy was asking for what?

What would have been a win condition for occupy?

What is more, the peacefulness of occupy is questionable.

First they were camping there and making a mess. You don't need to do that. MLK Jr didn't do that. They had peaceful orderly civilized clean sit ins and then went home every day to their homes.

Second, there was quite a lot of harassment in those camps and near them.

Third, they attracted a lot of gross hippies that caused crime to jump up in the area. Drugs, prostitution, rape, etc.

Look, if you want to solve your problems by being violent then you're basically betting you have more force on your side than all other factions combined. Because even if you think you outnumber some anti group to you. Do you ALSO outnumber the non-aligned people that want peace and order? Do you outnumber the people that just want to go to work every day and not get harassed by smelly hippies blocking the road?

You don't.

Which means if you actually escalate you'll get physically beaten until you submit or killed.

If that is what you want to do, then do it, comrade.

All your ideas accomplish if taken to their logical conclusion is install a tyrant that takes away everyone's rights, murders anyone that disagrees with him, and creates a class based power structure where people like you and me will just become peasants under a new nobility.

And if and when you do that where I live... I will just leave you to starve in that shit. My family came from countries that had fallen to tyranny. We left. And I'll leave again. I will not suffer the consequences of your foolishness. I will leave you to starve in burned out cities surviving on people's skinned pets.

Re:decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

I saw it in wallstreet... which was where it was... everywhere else was a metoo movement.

and in any case, what was your end game? What would have accomplishing something have meant?

Define your objective. Because what I saw at occupy was a bunch of confused people all asking for either contradictory or impossible things.

Re:decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

When has it not lead to tyranny?

As to republics being forged in anarchy, give an example.

I think I can clear up the misunderstanding if we go through the history of this shit show.

Re: decent riot control too

[Type44Q]

"Causation vs correlation" but whatever; I'm glad things seem so simple to you.

Re:decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

So... strawmen? I didn't say be apolitical.

If you're going to be degenerate then the discussion is over.

Re: decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

If it correlates every time then in practice there's no difference. this is not to concede causation. Merely to point out that it doesn't matter if it is caused or correlated with if the correlation is 1:1.

Re:decent riot control too

[Hognoxious]

Disruptors can't blend into the crowd or do violent stuff and then run away because the actual protestors are all sitting down. There is no crowd to blend into.

One, "crowd" doesn't imply standing up. Two, what's to stop cops or their lackeys posing as protesters and start doing shit?

Re:decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

US revolution naturally doesn't count because it was never anarchy.

There were colonial governments which were never deposed, rather their association with the crown of England was cut. What is more, they immediately associated the given colonial governments with each other... the nature of which was formalized with the drafting of the US Constitution.

What you see there is not anarchy but rather the exact opposite.

Re:decent riot control too

[Karmashock]

So in your scenario, the majority of real protesters are sitting down in a peaceful group...

And then police disguised as protestors stand up and start attacking people or throwing bricks... whilst again the majority are sitting down not doing anything?

Exactly how does that work out against the protesters?

You can't attack the people sitting down because the ACTOR is running around doing whatever.

You can ask them to leave or disperse... which you should do when instructed most of the time unless you have a permit or are otherwise within your rights to be there. Keep in mind, being contentious with the police is generally not in your interest.

You will get the police to see you as hostile which is typically not required or desired by protests.

And the second big problem is that why are you protesting in the first place? To get the PUBLIC on your side, right? Well, how likely is that going to happen if you're pissing everyone off with a big annoying shit show?

What you want to do is not cause problems, not piss off the public, and keep your message out there.

Here some asshat with no patience that is about 17 will say "we've tried all the peaceful options now its WAAAAR"... You're just going to get your ass beat and if anything the public will turn against you. You'll be unwittingly supporting your political opposition simply by making an ass of yourself.

Be patient. Be peaceful. Show up to some place where you are allowed to show up. Sit down. Do not disrupt the movement of random people trying to go about their lives.

Impatience is immaturity.

To act violently is often to presume you can achieve your ends through violence... most groups are in minorities so this is actually a confession of stupidity.

Protesting where you are not allowed to protest will lead to violence... and thus is generally stupid. The exception is if you have superior force which you won't so its stupid.

Standing up when you protest is generally just harder to control and can be subverted. If that isn't a problem because you can control your group and won't be subverted then it doesn't matter. If that is an issue then sit down or don't cry when you get burned.

Let people go about their business. If you piss people off by disrupting their behavior then you're basically protesting AGAINST yourself without realizing it.

Generally, most bad protest movements are thrown together by immature people that aren't very bright... or they're put together by clever people with false pretenses that gather together a bunch of young idiots to act out a series of events that often isn't what the young people want.

The world is very old and passion is not a substitute for wisdom. Just think it through a bit. Most of the big loud annoying protests of the last 20 years have been either idiotic or calculated manipulations of foolish idealistic people to serve other ends.

Don't be a dupe. Think.

Wanted for what?

[Patent Lover]

Wanted for murder or a parking ticket?

Re:Wanted for what?

[TWX]

Yes.

Re:Wanted for what?

[Anonymous Coward]

For that, you not only have to RTFA, but then click on the links in TFA to where they get their info from to finally get an answer:

He had been on a police watchlist for “economic crimes” -- a broad term that can include anything from tax evasion to the theft of public property.

Re:Wanted for what?

[AlanBDee]

It doesn't matter. As a law abiding citizen if I break any laws it's by accident. If I knew with a 100% certainty that I'd get a speeding ticket if I exceeded the speed limit then I'd aim to go 10 under the speed limit instead of 10 over.

I know it sounds draconian but right now there's a gamble with all crimes; there's a chance you'll get away with it. The chance of getting away with speeding is much higher then that of robbing a bank or murder. If facial recognition makes it much harder to get away with any crimes then it should have the effect of decreasing crimes overall. People who commit minor crimes will be more careful not to do so and those that commit major crimes are more likely to be caught and jailed.

At least this is all in theory. A good hoodie makes the technology mostly useless. Plus it's not uncommon for two people to look alike: Case in point: http://www.nydailynews.com/ent...

Re:Wanted for what?

[fibonacci8]

Setting an example. It's far more efficient scaring people into hiding because they think they might be wanted for something. Whether they are even wanted isn't important.

Re:Wanted for what?

[aberglas]

+1

Re:Wanted for what?

[Daralantan]

For being rated too low on social media.

Re:Wanted for what?

[RespekMyAthorati]

Plus it's not uncommon for two people to look alike

No problem!
Just arrest and torture both of them. Just to be safe.

Re:Just like all Americans have the same IQ

[hey!]

Oh, that's not true of all Americans; we have the same intelligence distribution as anyone else. Stupidity is an emergent behavior.

Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Very impressive that the software is able to distinguish one Chinese person from another. This ability has eluded humans for eons.

World first for mass surveilance?

[gumpish]

Setting aside the facial recognition component of the story, is the the first time mass surveillance has actually resulted in the apprehension of a fugitive? England is covered with cameras but you never hear stories about them doing any good.

Re:World first for mass surveilance?

[stephanruby]

England is covered with cameras but you never hear stories about them doing any good.

Are you sure? Even for those terrorists planting bombs?

Re:World first for mass surveilance?

[thegarbz]

England is covered with cameras but you never hear stories about them doing any good.

That's what you call observer bias. There are plenty of stories of them doing good. Hell nearly 10 years ago they were arresting and charging upwards of 2000 people a year based on CCTV footage alone.

Now whether you believe the stories or not is a different question. And that may be called conspiracy theories.

Re:World first for mass surveilance?

[mjwx]

Setting aside the facial recognition component of the story, is the the first time mass surveillance has actually resulted in the apprehension of a fugitive? England is covered with cameras but you never hear stories about them doing any good.

"Surveillance" catches criminals all the time. However a lot of surveillance is from private cameras, I.E. the murder of Jill Meagher in Australia was caught due to a CCTV camera pointing our of a shop window. The item of note here is the use of face recognition software.

The end of petty crime

[rsilvergun]

between cash going away and this kind of tracking petty crime is more or less going to become impossible. I suppose you could mug me for my shoes (my cell phone gets shut off if you steal it). But unless I'm wearing $300 Nikes what's the point?

What's funny is that even as crime rates plummet the "Tough on Crime" politics don't go away. Not sure about China, but a recent poll showed Crime was the #2 concern for Americans, only topped by health care.

Re: The end of petty crime

[Type44Q]

petty crime is more or less going to become impossible

And... I predict the opposite effect.

Re:In soviet Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Amazon's "Rekognition" is a much-hyped service on AWS, which one would presume is the basis of the people recognition in their Amazon Prime Photos app. It's so bad that it thinks almost any random black woman is my wife, while at times misidentifying photos that actually are her. For some unfathomable reason, the app does not let the user correct any misidentifications.

Perhaps the Chinese government does the same. If the system says you're the wanted person, you are.

How about the Unwanted?

[deesine]

I'm more concerned when unwanted men get caught.

Re:How about the Unwanted?

[sabt-pestnu]

That's okay. We can change their names to those of the accused, and presto!

Re:How much longer, I wonder..

[Luckyo]

That's already done pretty much everywhere in civilized world with reasonable amount of wealth. It's called "smartphones".

Do we know it was really facial recognition?

[EdwardFurlong]

Could just be a scare tactic by the government. Otherwise why show your hand? Use it to your advantage as long as possible before people find a way to hide from it.

Nice.

[Qbertino]

Joseph Goebbels is dancing in his grave. But who am I to complain. After all, just like everyone else I'm carrying a Televisor around with me. The upgraded version.

Re:In soviet Russia

[nospam007]

"I do wonder how many false alerts they got along the way."

False alerts? Everybody the machine recognizes goes to prison.
There _are_ no false alerts.

how many?

[AndyKron]

I wonder how many innocent people get caught up in this bullshit?

Difficult problem

[aberglas]

Because faces do not contain serial numbers. Instead, many different features that change subtly over time, and look different from different angles and lighting. Matching all those fuzzy stats to a large database is not at all trivial. For every face there will be thousands that look almost identical in a database containing millions.

And I suspect not really possible. I suspect that they used other things like cell phones to reduce the set of possibilities, and then use the facial recognition as the last step.

propoganda

[sad_]

we'll be hearing a lot of 'good' news from these facial recognition camera's in china in the next few months.
just to prove how good they are making the world a safer, nicer place to live in.
don't expect them to tell you what other privacy invading things they are doing with it.

Expected this claim even if untrue ...

[fygment]

Let's say the system didn't work ie. doesn't recognize faces in _real_ time.
Would they admit that?
Nope. Fake it with an actor. Put the fear of god (or cameras) in to people.
And in future when someone gets caught, comb the video records for pictures of the person and claim they were caught _because_ of the video.
Ultimately the system might be useful for retroactive evidence just as those systems are now but instilling a belief that they are 'real time' is a good way to prevent crime in the first place.