Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects • Hacker News Board

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#51

Post by ShabbosGoy » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:32 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #47

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FaceID samples are generated from a very small camera. It’s trivial to train a CNN image classifier that can identify an individual, even when they are wearing a hat, grew facial hair, have a scar, etc

And now have that work without depth data, increase the population size from one person to 1+ billion, apply to moving video, aim for high precision and high recall, keep it battery friendly as you distribute to all police, somehow get the classifier of 1B unique people onto all these embedded devices, keep it up to date as people age, etc.... Hardly trivial.

I don’t disagree that doing image classification at scale with the parameters you’re describing is non-trivial.

But I was attempting to rebut GP’s point that a small camera is incapable of performing facial recognition. That’s plain incorrect. Speed/scale are orthogonal issues.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#52

Post by commandpaul » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:33 AM UTC

Has anyone played with Baidou`s Face Ai Products , I cant read Mandrin and The site is impossible to navigate with google transelate.@ http://ai.baidu.com/tech/face Would really appreciate a pointer to a independent performance eval of the same .

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#53

Post by thatcat » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:35 AM UTC

danschumann wrote: post #28

wonder_er wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but disagree with your 99.999% assessment. I feel like at best it might be 50%. At which point, it's horrible for society to be rolling the dice on every person in prison, if they should be there or not. I would refer you to the Innocence Project [0] for a useful exposition of wrongful convictions, and error rates therein. [0] https://www.innocenceproject.org/cases/

I don't know, I feel like neighborhoods where no one has outstanding warrants would be more desirable than neighborhoods with many.

You're making a false comparision between none and many when it seems like a few would be a much nicer place to live after accounting for civil offenses and the points made by parent.

This technology puts a human face to technological surveillance, there has to be some minimum psychological cost for everyone there which may outweigh the claimed benefits.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#54

Post by mc32 » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:37 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #47

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FaceID samples are generated from a very small camera. It’s trivial to train a CNN image classifier that can identify an individual, even when they are wearing a hat, grew facial hair, have a scar, etc

And now have that work without depth data, increase the population size from one person to 1+ billion, apply to moving video, aim for high precision and high recall, keep it battery friendly as you distribute to all police, somehow get the classifier of 1B unique people onto all these embedded devices, keep it up to date as people age, etc.... Hardly trivial.

Wouldn't they do something like take all wanteds from each local precinct, up to 10000 from each village, top 10000 from local township, top 10000 from local county, top 10000 from local prefecture, etc...?

I mean you're not trying to ID every person in front of you. You want to be able to pick out known bad elements within your coverage zone.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#55

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:37 AM UTC

danschumann wrote: post #28

wonder_er wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but disagree with your 99.999% assessment. I feel like at best it might be 50%. At which point, it's horrible for society to be rolling the dice on every person in prison, if they should be there or not. I would refer you to the Innocence Project [0] for a useful exposition of wrongful convictions, and error rates therein. [0] https://www.innocenceproject.org/cases/

I don't know, I feel like neighborhoods where no one has outstanding warrants would be more desirable than neighborhoods with many.

[deleted]

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#56

Post by goatsi » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:40 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #47

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FaceID samples are generated from a very small camera. It’s trivial to train a CNN image classifier that can identify an individual, even when they are wearing a hat, grew facial hair, have a scar, etc

And now have that work without depth data, increase the population size from one person to 1+ billion, apply to moving video, aim for high precision and high recall, keep it battery friendly as you distribute to all police, somehow get the classifier of 1B unique people onto all these embedded devices, keep it up to date as people age, etc.... Hardly trivial.

The article mentions that the glasses are connected to a smartphone like device. That can handle the battery and computing, all you need on the glasses portion is the camera. You don't load all the data onto the device, you just ping back to a central database (that way you also get to track every location that someone shows up at). To keep things up to date you simply pull the latest images of the person from a commercial partner who will identify and photograph them much more frequently than the government.

>Banks are beginning to use facial recognition instead of cards at cash machines while the travel and leisure industry also sees opportunities — China Southern Airlines this year began doing away with boarding passes in favour of the scheme.

If your facial recognition data in the system is out of date you will eventually find it difficult to withdraw cash or travel. People will update it themselves.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#57

Post by azinman2 » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:42 AM UTC

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #51

azinman2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now have that work without depth data, increase the population size from one person to 1+ billion, apply to moving video, aim for high precision and high recall, keep it battery friendly as you distribute to all police, somehow get the classifier of 1B unique people onto all these embedded devices, keep it up to date as people age, etc.... Hardly trivial.

I don’t disagree that doing image classification at scale with the parameters you’re describing is non-trivial. But I was attempting to rebut GP’s point that a small camera is incapable of performing facial recognition. That’s plain incorrect. Speed/scale are orthogonal issues.

First, faceid is a depth camera not a photo camera. It’s also quite high resolution.

Second of course you CAN do recognition on something that’s low resolution. But if the question is how many labels can you correctly identify with high precision and recall... well... that’s a harder problem.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#58

Post by drawkbox » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:44 AM UTC

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #46

All these reports have the feelings of small rumblings or rumors of purges and famines that leaked out of the Soviet Union in the 30’s. The dismissal of all of them due to China’s size and growth really strengthens the analogy too. Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime. I mean the definition for loitering is so broad that alone gets most people. The ad-t…

> Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime.

I think that is the big issue we will see and have seen recently.

Surveillance tools are better than ever in history. Many times, laws were created as deterrents to some behavior, that maybe shouldn't be laws, because it wasn't easy to nab everyone doing it. Back then cops, judges and more weren't as locked into forced outcomes i.e. three strikes, mandatory minimums etc and there was more humanity in corrections at that level.

Now that we have surveillance at this level and going up, we need to remove the criminalization of certain things otherwise everyone will be locked up.

Moral laws or making illegal non-violent/no civil violations actions will not work in mass surveillance, only laws that are violent and infringe on civil rights of others should remain.

An example might be the criminalization of drugs or old laws on the books. If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would have a record.

With surveillance this high and going up, we MUST decriminalize and re-evaluate every law. The problem is our 'corrections' and law enforcement, is that both have turned predatory along with the advancements in technology that have been used to erode privacy.

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#59

Post by azinman2 » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:44 AM UTC

goatsi wrote: post #56

azinman2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now have that work without depth data, increase the population size from one person to 1+ billion, apply to moving video, aim for high precision and high recall, keep it battery friendly as you distribute to all police, somehow get the classifier of 1B unique people onto all these embedded devices, keep it up to date as people age, etc.... Hardly trivial.

The article mentions that the glasses are connected to a smartphone like device. That can handle the battery and computing, all you need on the glasses portion is the camera. You don't load all the data onto the device, you just ping back to a central database (that way you also get to track every location that someone shows up at). To keep things up to date you simply pull the latest images of the person from a comm…

Try performing computer vision on your smart phone running non-stop, and tell me how long it lasts :)

Re: Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects

#60

Post by vadimberman » Thu, Feb 08, 2018, 5:46 AM UTC

I'm sorry, I do not understand the alarmist tone.

Yes, in many cases the uses of tech in China are disturbing (like the supposedly planned social credit system).

But this case? It's the job of the police to find people. Facial recognition helps it (although, I suspect, it won't be as flawless as advertised). How is it functionally different from the recognition tech in airports? Because the cops look scarier?