Facial recognition is still treated like some magical technology, like the "zoom in, enhance" feature much mocked about on TV crime shows. I bet Facebook's technology is ahead of law enforcement's in terms of data, algorithm, and refinement, and yet it still stumbles on pretty obvious faces (if you have the default auto-tag feature left on)
"zoom in, enhance" feature much mocked about on TV crime shows
The problem is that any non-perfect automated system will wrongly convict so many civilians as being terrorists that nobody will trust it anymore. Let's say that you want to catch terrorists creeping around in your airport. To do this, you have a magic camera that, when it takes a picture of a civilian, compares it to a picture of a known terrorist. If they're in fact the same person, it will flag security over. Let'…
Do you know how unreliably people recognize strangers? Many people are already wrongly convicted on such evidence. Even perfect automated facial recognition won't convict people. It will merely point out people that should be looked at. If a jury looking at the image and the guy's face think the system is wrong, they can disregard it. As far as prevention goes, what we need are systems that can detect deception relia…
Sure, I should have picked a better word than "Convict", especially since I didn't mean it in a legal sense. Given the context, "flag" or "decide" or "indicate" would have worked better. I only wanted to convey that the system thinks the probe and gallery pictures are the same person
It seems disingenuous to say that facial recognition failed. As far as I can tell, all the images we had of these suspects were either very low-resolution, taken from angles, or both. Seems plausible that law enforcement didn't have any good candidate images from which to run a facial recognition search. > In the end it was mostly dumb luck What? Painstaking police work went in to getting images of these suspects, an…
The brothers didn't leave the area, didn't go into hiding and were able to kill a campus officer and hijack a car, all without police finding them for a week. It was mostly dumb luck. It's not like they were hiding! Oh, and http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/03/27/hanover-police-trying-...
You are wrong. We know that the younger brother returned to his school 60 miles away from the bombing, and was seen at his school partying it up the day before the MIT officer was killed. Please get your facts straight.
Not just facial recognition, the "terror watch list" failed (after a warning from Russia about the older brother) lack of background checks on the AR15s they owned failed, the secured perimeter failed (the teenager was outside of it) the city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown). In the end it was mostly dumb luck, dumb criminals, and the…
It seems disingenuous to say that facial recognition failed. As far as I can tell, all the images we had of these suspects were either very low-resolution, taken from angles, or both. Seems plausible that law enforcement didn't have any good candidate images from which to run a facial recognition search. > In the end it was mostly dumb luck What? Painstaking police work went in to getting images of these suspects, an…
Facial recognition is still treated like some magical technology, like the "zoom in, enhance" feature much mocked about on TV crime shows. I bet Facebook's technology is ahead of law enforcement's in terms of data, algorithm, and refinement, and yet it still stumbles on pretty obvious faces (if you have the default auto-tag feature left on)
"zoom in, enhance" feature much mocked about on TV crime shows Actually, those jokes refer to a scene in Blade Runner : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0
NTSF:SD:SUV Parody of the 'enhance' trope in cop drama setting:
The brothers didn't leave the area, didn't go into hiding and were able to kill a campus officer and hijack a car, all without police finding them for a week. It was mostly dumb luck. It's not like they were hiding! Oh, and http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/03/27/hanover-police-trying-...
They didn't go into hiding or leave because they didn't think they needed to. It seems pretty clear they they didn't want to be caught. From what I can tell, numerous people called in after the photos were released. Even if Thursday's events hadn't taken place, the police would have known the identities of both suspects shortly thereafter. It just seems crazy to me not to acknowledge the role of investigators in all…
It just seems crazy to me not to acknowledge the role of investigators in all of this and chock it up to luck
People do crazy things when they have made up their minds before the story even begins.
Talking about the scanners and technology (and failures) didn't "homeland security" give millions to metro police departments around the country to get their communication encrypted? I vaguely remember reading about that a couple years ago. I wonder where that money went if that is accurate. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22federal+grant%22+%22encry...
Apparently the police prefer interoperability over secrecy - if all the departments had encrypted comms during this manhunt, nobody would have been able to talk to each other because there were so many different police forces out there.
Interoperability is very highly valued. I just went through some government training courses on incident response, and interoperability was stressed many times.
When the FBI released the photos of the two suspects, I kept wondering, "Why do they need the publics help when I'm sure there is facial recognition software to help match the suspects' faces?" Well I guess this article somewhat answers this, but I am still in disbelief that our government does not have better software. For how long it took to discover their names, the two suspects had TOO much time to escape. They h…
Facebook only has to distinguish among friends of the uploader. And it's not perfect. This man was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. He would not have been identifiable out of the tens of thousands of people at the event, matched across the (probably) millions of people in the database.
Plus Facebook gets high resolution pictures of people's faces, and asks for confirmation. It doesn't get it right every time.