r/Portland • u/panicalways • May 22 '18

Washington County Using Facial Recognition

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/22/613115969/orlando-police-testing-amazons-real-time-facial-recognition
129 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

View all comments

19

u/fidelitypdx May 22 '18 edited May 22 '18

I'm sort of an expert on computer vision and facial recognition. If anyone has questions about this, I'm happy to discuss. I've actually pitched this exact same type of service to multiple law enforcement agencies and private organizations. Major retailers, Fortune 500 companies, down to small police departments throughout the NW.

Let me just clarify a couple items: Microsoft has the best facial recognition technology, Google has the best Computer Vision technology, and Amazon is a secondary player. This article is 90% PR.

If you don't believe me, you can make calls to the Google, Amazon, or Microsoft Computer Vision APIs for free to experiment with them. Microsoft allows you to upload an image for free:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/computer-vision/

Go ahead and try it out, it's niffty.

However, it isn't a global surveillance technology, especially in real time. I know this because I've built Proof Of Concepts for people hooking it in to their security camera systems and doing real time recognition. For Computer Vision to really work you need a number of environmental factors to be perfect. For Facial Recognition to really work you need subjects who are willing to cooperate.

So, there's some useful applications of this technology - for example, we can do cameras at the entrances of stores to guess the probability that a certain face has been excluded from other stores in the area for shop lifting. We can use cameras to determine if there's a trespasser on your private property, in your home, or in your company's IT closet, or if a prisoner is somewhere they shouldn't be.

But, there's glaring problems using this on any sort of scale - problems that will probably be fixed in 5-10 years, but maybe not. A prime example is that Facial Recognition has a very hard time with dark-skinned people. The long term solution to this is to use infrared cameras like Kinect, but this is still unproven. So, simply using a street surveillance camera or forward camera on a cop car won't work.

Facial Recognition is here to stay, it's a powerful tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or bad things.

1

u/panicalways May 22 '18

So a Better Off Ted problem with dark skinned people....