Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn't Help Find Bombing Suspects 235
A reader writes "ArsTechnica reports: 'While the whole country is relieved that this past week's Boston Marathon bombing ordeal and subsequent lockdown of the city is finally over, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Washington Post that the department's facial recognition system "did not identify" the two bombing suspects. "The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs' images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver's license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation," the Post reported on Saturday. Facial recognition systems can have limited utility when a grainy, low-resolution image captured at a distance from a cellphone camera or surveillance video is compared with a known, high-quality image. Meanwhile, the FBI is expected to release a large-scale facial recognition apparatus "next year for members of the Western Identification Network, a consortium of police agencies in California and eight other Western states," according to the San Jose Mercury News. Still, video surveillance did prove extremely useful in pinpointing the suspects.'"
Enhance it and zoom in (Score:5, Funny)
Rinse and repeat
Re:Enhance it and zoom in (Score:5, Insightful)
If only all those millions of security cameras were as good as they are on TV. But they aren't. The images they produce are shitty and worthless. So they identified the suspects by having FBI agents sitting at a monitor and watching video over and over and over.
But that won't stop the FBI from rolling out yet another billion dollar boondoggle facial recognition system.
Re:Enhance it and zoom in (Score:5, Informative)
What? You mean you can't "Zoom and enhance" a 640x480 video to the point that you can see the fingerprint left on a window 25' away
Unfortunately, I know people that actually think that stuff is legit. Which of course leads to "fun" arguments / questions about "Why can't you do THIS, I see them do it on TV all the time."
Re:Enhance it and zoom in (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Enhance it and zoom in (Score:5, Insightful)
License plates are a special case. They only have letters and numbers on them. The resolution of a camera may be too low for image processing software to extract an arbitrary image from it. But the fact that it is a license plate gives the algorithm prior knowledge which may help it extract the most likely plate number even if an arbitrary image can't be recognized.
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Re:security DVR's (Score:2)
Re:Enhance it and zoom in (Score:5, Funny)
It should be noted that the old facial recognition software worked just fine. It was the fancy new computer based facial recognition software that failed.
Re:Enhance it and zoom in (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, even low resolution cameras can be really useful, under certain conditions. If the suspect stands still for a few frames, the images can sometimes be enhanced due to motion differences between the frames. The process is like anti-aliasing in reverse.
In the video clips i saw on the news the suspects were walking, and the differences between frames looked too great to get the kind of data needed to interpolate.
If you're interested in seeing this done in a non-fakey-CSI application, Thierry Legault is an astrophotographer who uses frame interpolation to produce amazingly clear shots of objects like the ISS. See his site here to learn more: http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/ [perso.sfr.fr]
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This technique is commonly used in plate recognition software for example. Program identifies all frames with plate, crops/scales/aligns and then goes to town. You can have grainy 320x240 of a car where plate looks like a white line 3-4 pixel high and it will still be able to extract real number out of it.
No, actually. A witness identified him. (Score:2)
So they identified the suspects by having FBI agents sitting at a monitor and watching video over and over and over.
No, actually. They spent hundreds if not thousands of man-hours looking over the video, and then the guy with his legs blown off came out of sedation and wrote "I know who did it" on a pad, and the FBI was at his beside not longer after, getting a description of events and the suspect.
The witness said one of them plonked the backpack down next to him and walked away. Looked him right in the
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Maybe it won't. But I'm still glad that at least this event didn't give another argument to those who want to plaster our streets with security cameras.
What do you think this statement is about then? "Oh gosh, the old and inferior system we have now isn't good enough so we'll just have to be happy with it the way it is" I think not. This is clearly an early play in the "well if we had X we could have prevented/resolved this in a better/faster manner".
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU [youtube.com]
Re:Enhance it and zoom in (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU [youtube.com]
Re:Enhance it and zoom in (Score:4, Funny)
Best if every face scanned is shown on screen next to the original and beep.
Maybe next time (Score:2)
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Damn, I entered specifically to say that.
Picasa is awesomely good at matching grainy images.
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I dunno, I ran Picasa on my pr0n dir, and it gets all the Czech models mixed up all the time.
But I guess that just means the face recognition software is American...
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/04/czech-republic-ambassador-dont-confuse-us-with-chechnya/ [go.com]
Re:Maybe next time (Score:4, Funny)
I dunno, I ran Picasa on my pr0n dir, and it gets all the Czech models mixed up all the time.
There's your problem- you're using face recognition. Looks like there's a need for an extension so the recognition software can look further south...
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Damn, I entered specifically to say that.
Picasa is awesomely good at matching grainy images.
When the images are from low res surveillance cameras that are worn out, have crappy lenses that are into the bargain grimy and the faces you are trying to match are not full frontal or profile shots you Picasa sucks just as much as anything else.
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what about matching a grainy image to a high resolution image from the DMV? Perhaps that's where the technology failed.
Indeed (Score:2)
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tell that to my users, please.
And add that I am not a magician.
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People who don't know any better have been known throughout history to explain just about anything as magic. Why should computers be any different? Now, if you disagree, I will "re-program" my computer to shoot lightning at you across the internet!
Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Informative)
If I'm not mistaken, the CCTV footage was not as useful... what did help was the one man who took a picture of the bomber (unbeknownst to him at the time), and more importantly, the unfortunate man whose legs were blown off at the knees who valiantly gave an ID from his hospital bed.
Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there really something valiant and courageous about ID'ing the person who just turned you into an amputee?
I'm not belittling the man, I feel awful for him as that's one of the most horrendous life changing things I can imagine happening, but I'm not entirely sure what heroic act this man has performed, he's done what anyone in his situation would do - the maximum he can to exact revenge.
Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but the bravado being shown regarding people who did what anyone would expect them to do between this and the poor MIT officer who got shot dead without being given chance to defend himself strikes me as a little odd.
I would argue, the heroes, if any, are those who rushed to the aid of the injured without knowing if they themselves could become victims of another bomb or attack as they did so, not the poor sods who died or are led in hospital beds - they're unfortunate victims. Is no one allowed to be a victim in America? Must every victim be made a hero whilst the real heroes go unnamed and unknown?
Certainly I imagine that if this is what heroism is, the guy led missing his legs would rather be one of the unknown and unnamed.
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I imagine that someone waking up with their legs blown off might have more legitimately selfish things to worry about than catching the bomber such as whether they were going to live, how long they were going to be in hospital, or mourning all the favorite activities that would not be possible for a long time to come - if ever at all. I'd argue that for someone in that position to wake up and immediately want to talk to investigators is heroic. He may not have made a heroic choice to be involved in the
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There's an unfortunate tendency to label "heroes" people who suffer some dramatic, tragic fate. The crews of Challenger and Columbia were hailed as heroes, when in reality they weren't any more heroic than any other space shuttle crew, just a lot more unfortunate.
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Wasn't it a combination of all of the above? The FBI collected video recordings and photos from all available sources, and identified two suspects. The FBI had one of the suspects putting the backpack on the ground right before one of the explosions, and also saw the two of them walk away from the scene afterward. That information was enough to pick those two and, for example, rule out the people identified by the NY Post and Reddit. But the images weren't clear enough, so they asked for the public's help f
Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW if we have a single payer health insurance system, this would not even be an issue.
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Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the benefits of private sector comes only when there is high degree of competition between the private companies and there is an informed consumers making rational choices to provide feedback.
This is the biggest myth about health care: That people make "rational, informed" choices. They don't. You don't have an appendix attack and shop around to a few hospitals to see who has the best rate: They put you in the ambulance and you go to the closest place with a resource available to save your life. As for a "free market" in health care, that's an interesting academic discussion, but certainly isn't something that will ever exist in the real world.
There is a massive barrier to entry in providing services: You can't just up and become a doctor. There's licensing, education, and liability insurance premiums. In a "free market" new providers would rush to provide the service that has become so rare that the price spiked. But that's an 8-12 years pipeline to add new doctors, and a 2-6 year pipeline for new RNs, MSNs. And all of that adds up to this: It isn't really a free market, and there probably isn't much hope of it ever becoming one because sick patients will always be mostly frightened and want the first option that saves their lives. Our society will never allow any random to person to just say "I'm a doctor!" and provide medical care. So we're stuck: We can't grow the supply of doctors and high-skill nurses fast enough to provide care for all the sick people, and we can't get sick people to say "fuck you! I'd rather die than pay that much!" (yet) so that's where it stands.
It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
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It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
I agree with you. It is not a free market. At this point the rational thing to do is either support a single payer healthcare system, or let poor people who can't pay for their healthcare suffer without bothering our conscience.
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This is the biggest myth about health care: That people make "rational, informed" choices. ... There is a massive barrier to entry in providing services ... It ain't a "free market,"
Good arguments, but no good ideologue will let reality interfere with his beliefs.
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I don't shop around for Healthcare because I KNOW IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE. Thanks to Insurance all medical costs are A: More or less the same no matter where I go and B: Completely obfuscated from the consumer.
Without the insurance regime I know in advance that healthcare is my responsibility and I do what most people use to do: I find myself a good GP who doesn't cost an arm and a leg long before I'm ever in crises.
Just because things are this way now does NOT mean this is the only way things can be
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Without the insurance regime I know in advance that healthcare is my responsibility and I do what most people use to do: I find myself a good GP who doesn't cost an arm and a leg long before I'm ever in crises.
So having a good GP means that you'll never be in an accident or develop, say, some awful cancer?
Blue Cross/Shield were originally founded as non-profits (they actually used to be pretty good) by the doctors and hospitals because they weren't getting paid by people who needed lots of medical care (regardless of whether they'd had good GP's). That was in 1929, so what do you mean by "what most people used to do"? In the 19th century?
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And second, for people whose insurance is tied to their employer via a group plan: that people make "rational, informed" choices about their insurance. I've never been able to choose my insurance -- the
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If most of your health care comes from ER visits, you're probably doing it wrong.
Your point, though, is valid. Price comparison at the consumer level is all but impossible. Try walking into your doctor's office and asking how much for an appointment. They won't be able to tell you. The real answer is "it depends on what we end up doing, and what rates your insurance company negotiated, if you have one".
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Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Insightful)
I maintain my own insurance and everyone else should do the same.
Really? You are buying private health insurance as an individual? Either you are crazy or you are swimming in money or you are being swindled.
My W2 shows how much my company has been paying for my health care. Works out to 10K a year for a family. My brother is an independent contractor. He cant buy anything for less than 20K for equivalent coverage. By joining some network of independents he is buying it for some 14K.
It is very much possible to buy the same coverage for as little as 8K. But the moment you file a claim, they jack up your rates, and if you have chronic conditions they bump you off and do not renew. All the premia you have paid all these years thinking you have coverage? Sit down, it might come as a shock to you. The private health care companies that you are so vociferously defending anonymously, will dump you in a second.
But I could be wrong. You could be one of the shills hired by the private health care companies to get on early on the threads and defend health care companies. You might simply be doing your job.
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Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of single payer is hurting the economy. How many people do you know who hold onto crappy jobs in order to keep the insurance? How many people that could be starting the next Google, or contracting to other companies that need part time expertise? It's really a shame.
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Lack of single payer is hurting the economy.
Hear, hear! I used to be part of a small 4 person consulting outfit. One of the reasons we had to close up shop is because we couldn't afford the medical insurance. Yes, it was cheaper than an individual plan, but still close to 2x what a large company would pay.
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Such things are always handled much more efficiently by the private market. If we had single payer, every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be going to the doctor every time they got a sniffle and the bill would be Trillions. If you are successful and smart you will go to the doctor only when you need to, and you will be able to pay with cash you have earned previously. I maintain my own insurance and everyone else should do the same.
Is this opposed to the current system where everyone without insurance goes to the ER when they have a sniffle instead? Remember that ERs cannot deny service in the United States due to lack of insurance so tax dollars are paying for them now as it is. If people went to their primary care physician instead meaning better service at the ER when people really need the ER.
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The ER's only requirement is to treat life threatening situations. They will happily bandage you up and send you home with an antibiotic or painkiller prescription you can't afford. They will als
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In the UK, the wait times for care are often extremely long. The five year outcomes for someone diagnosed with a serious illness are significantly worse in the UK than in the US.
Wait times for elective procedures may be long. OTOH medically related bankruptcy is very infrequent. I'd like to see some data on your attestation that serious illness outcomes are worse in the UK. Overall (and there likely are exceptions to everything), the UK and Europe have much better long term survivals for everything except some odd cancers and when you look at that data, the differences are in months, not years, indicating the US system flogs nearly dead patients for longer - not necessarily a 'b
Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you could be informed... and look at reality. Highest cost as percentage of GDP in the world, coverage of 2/3rd the population? Yay US! I've got private healthcare (it's often a job perk in the UK), but I also know that if I lost my job tomorrow, had some chronic illness or something that wasn't covered I'd still be fine. I get taxed for it, but I still feel more 'free' than I would were it necessary to be employed or maintain a private health insurance policy for coverage. Also we get much more holiday over here, no worries about random gun violence - our police are generally unarmed because they generally don't need to be armed, and you get all the rain you can complain about.
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Such things are always handled much more efficiently by the private market. If we had single payer, every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be going to the doctor every time they got a sniffle and the bill would be Trillions.
Houston, we have a problem. The proponents of "privately funded" healthcare now make arguments so absurd and divorced from reality that I have trouble telling them from sarcasm. AC: please clarify.
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If we had single payer, every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be going to the doctor every time they got a sniffle and the bill would be Trillions.
Good thinking there.
Let's say that 100 of these freeloading parasites wuss out and just go to the doctor like whiny little babies when they start feeling sick. The overworked medical offices are forced to spend half an hour seeing each of them, and hand out prescriptions for over-the-counter medications, a couple antibiotics, and a few dozen of the lazy little weasels are advised to stay home from work for a day or two.
Total cost to the country as a whole: 50 hours of time for local doctor's offices, a
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Congratulations on not having a clue how health care works.
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My last doc bill was $120 for a kid's appointment. My insurance negotiated rate ended up around $58. How does that cash discount sound now?
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Gotta love medical billing. I still have an unpaid $2k bill from an anesthesiologist that I refuse to pay because he won't accept anything close what insurance would have paid him. That's $2k for maybe an hour's work. If he took half (still more than what insurance would pay) I'd send him a check today. Greedy bastards.
Anesthesiologists are amongst the worst rip off artists. People can often pick the surgeon but get an anesthesiologist that's luck of the draw. Conveniently, they never take your insurance
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BTW if we have a single payer health insurance system, this would not even be an issue.
But that would be communism!
Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Informative)
Not only does Bauman have employer-sponsored health coverage through Costco — the company “is also matching donations made by colleagues at the chain’s Nashua location,” according to a more recent Globe article from Friday. Bauman is being forced to raise funds despite this assistance due to the extraordinarily high costs associated with the amount of current and ongoing care that he requires.
Personally, I think this is a perfect example of why having health insurance run by for-profit organizations is a terrible idea and why the taxpayers paying for health insurance would be better. Anyway, the victims are being taken care of better than most citizens will be, as of friday, three had sites where people could donate to their health costs, and they were all above $400k. In at least Bauman's case, his employer is matching, so that's more like $800k.
Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Interesting)
Health insurance will not work in a free market. Insurance works only when the claimants and the insurer does not know who will file a claim and whose policies will expire without any claims. You don't know when/if your house will burn down or your car will be totaled. Nor do insurance companies. This model will work in free market.
In health care, diabetics, heart disease patients, cancer surviors, transplant recipients know how much they are going claim for sure. So does the insurer. Free market will force companies to refuse to insure them. People without chronic condition will refuse to buy policies.
For health care, single payer is the only system that will work. The savings from paperwork and preventive treatment will be enough to pay for the people currently without insurance and to contain the growth of health care costs.
Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Insightful)
Health insurance will not work in a free market. Insurance works only when the claimants and the insurer does not know who will file a claim and whose policies will expire without any claims. You don't know when/if your house will burn down or your car will be totaled. Nor do insurance companies. This model will work in free market.
They may not know when your house will burn down, but by using statistics, they know the risk of homes like yours burning down.
I think you severely underestimate the usefulness and effectiveness of the actuarial sciences [wikipedia.org].
The insurance companies are so sure of their statistics, that they only thing they buy secondary insurance for is natural disasters.
Re:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:5, Insightful)
Insurance works, only when it is operating on large sample sizes and liklihood estimates and expected values and statistics. If it is specific and individualized, they stop working. A diabetic knows exactly how much his insulin is going to cost. And will buy insurance only if the premium is less than the expected claims. The insurance company will not insure him for less than the cost of claims known `a priori. This is a deadlock.
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If Dzhokhar is deemed an enemy combatant, all the victims would lose their health insurance coverage.
But regardless of whether he is declared an enemy combatant, he will receive any medical care he may need. God bless America, where we help the criminals/terrorists, but the victims can go screw themselves.
The same thing happened after 9/11. Many of the people who helped at the site, like construction workers who volunteered literally before the dust settled, and who were rightly hailed as heroes, got screwed on medical care. It was a national shame and little reported.
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sqrt(-1) grammar nazi (Score:2)
Pinpointing the suspect's what?
Oh wait, that's grammatically correct. It's a sad day when I start imagining /. grammar mistakes that aren't actually there.
CCTV (Score:2)
The surveillance footage probably helped identify the bombers. But they were initially apprehended by an MIT campus security officer and while he may well have known who to look for it was his training and bravery that made the most significant impact in this case. So questions about the value of CCTV and other tech to one side, we mustn't forget there is a very important human element in amongst all. I kind of feel it is imporatnt to not lose sight of this.
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But they were initially apprehended by an MIT campus security officer and while he may well have known who to look for it was his training and bravery that made the most significant impact in this case
*Boggle* Did you make this shit up? If not, you need to disqualify the source as a reference for valid information.
Wonder who it *did* recognize (Score:4, Interesting)
Gotta wonder if it picked up matches for random people who are wanted for one thing or another, and if there will be follow-up investigations on those leads.
And if so, if crowd-scanning will become a precedent...
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Authorities have always wanted magically accurate identification. And yes, they want to use it everywhere. They don't appreciate the difficulties inherent in applying a system that can match people in high quality images against a database of a few hundred high quality images, to poor pictures against a database of over a million tiny, poor quality mug shots. Even if they upgrade all the photos, a system with a fantastically good 0.01% false positive rate will still find about 100 matches for every perso
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn't Help Find Bombing Suspects"
Thousands of paramilitary, guns, Humvees, helicopters, robots, hours and hours of lockdown of millions of people and the suspect went uncaught.
A homeowner on a smoke break finds him.
Who the fuck cares about facial recognition, I say arm the citizens and save money and time.
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It works in Syria!
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the fuck cares about facial recognition, I say arm the citizens and save money and time.
Go to Somalia and find out how good that works out.
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A gun is the difference between a citizen and a subject ...
Huh? What century do you think you are living in???
Three cornered hats are coming back into style.
Nevertheless, the Internet is still a useful reference when one wants to post such insightful and original slogans as the GP. Robert Heinlein would be proud. Sci-fi writers who target a somewhat more mature audience, not so much.
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Arm and educate. Somolia lacks one of the two that the U.S. as a first world country really should not.
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Who the fuck cares about facial recognition, I say arm the citizens and save money and time.
Nice of you to promote your pet cause. Despite the protests of the NRA, you can buy firearms, even in Boston. Perhaps you're not satisfied with the citizen's choice to call the BPD instead of foolishly getting his head blown off. I might point out, that despite not playing Rambo, the actions of said citizen did lead to catching the perpetrators. I think that's a good thing - how about you?
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So we just accept the 'can't be done' route... (Score:2)
Not really a fan of this technology - but my thought is this would be a good place to work on fine-tuning the system to increase the effectiveness. You have several RL image sources/raw footage and know what the result should be... time to work on debugging.
Face recognition technology isn't very good (Score:5, Insightful)
Current-generation face-recognition systems have a false positive rate of about 1 in 1,000 even when they have excellent images to work with -- high-resolution, well-lit, full-face frontal photos with no obscuring hats, glasses, etc. So even if CCTVs captured excellent images, if you're searching a database of tens of millions you're going to get a lot of matches. In a case like the Boston bombing it's okay if you get a few thousand hits because there is manpower available to sort through and narrow those down to the dozens which the (much more accurate) human eye/brain can't distinguish, and then there's manpower available to chase down each of those leads.
When you reduce the image quality, though, make it grainy, at an angle, poorly lit, and throw in some baseball caps... forget it. You have to reduce the match threshold, and then instead of thousands of candidate matches, you have tens or hundreds of thousands. For that matter, consider the fact that humans can't deal well with those constraints, and we're social animals who devote a significant portion of our enormous brain capacity to exactly this task.
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I'm not convinced that we'll ever have facial recognition software that will be able to identify anyone in the USA. The false positive rate would have to be below 1 in 300 million to be completely automated. That's a really high bar to achieve. In addition to your points about poor quality images and various angles, there's also the fact that people's faces change as they age. Other things can fool recognition software too -- facial hair changes, facial expressions, makeup.
My guess is that something else wi
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Facebook's recognition software doesn't look through its millions of users to find a facial recognition match in a photograph. It only looks through your list of friends. So it's only going through a few thousand photographs of a few hundred people. It doesn't have to go through millions of photographs.
The technology will improve. (Score:3)
I have loaded some 45000 pictures, almost all family pics, on to Picasa. Once I identify a face and tag it, it finds the same face in other photos. And as I mark yes/no for its findings, it improves remarkably. It is not confused by heavy make up worn by Bharatnatyam dancers. [google.com] It is finding the correct faces of 20 such dancers lined up facing the camera. It picks faces obscured in dark backgrounds, in out of focus pictures, faces occupying hardly 50 x 50 pixels. Faces at all orientations, including upside down. Half faces, faces with just one eye... It is really amazing.
What is amazing is its mistakes. It mistakes mother for daughter and vice versa. Confuses brothers with sisters when they are toddlers but not when they are teens or adults.
But this is forward match, going from a known face and looking for it in a crowd. Boston police is trying the reverse look up on a massive scale. It failed today. But like Lycos and webcrawler being upstaged when Google solved the reverse look up problem, some day the reverse look up problem will be solved. With parallel technology? Through GPU's running million forward searches simultaneously? But someday soon, the reverse look up will be solved and the automatic photo identification will work.
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it's probably more of a problem of there being too many hits, the grainy image doesn't have that much data and if you have to compare it to couple of million potential candidates.. finding it from a set of few hundred like you would with fb/picasa/whatever image tag is easy though. not because there's not enough processing power mind you, but because it's going to be hitting too many potential matches.
Refund? (Score:3)
So if the system doesn't actually catch bad guys, why do they still have it? Did they not save their sales receipt from spending all those tax dollars?
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there is an ongoing effort to intimidate the populace into mental submission to government and its police. This is a necessary step in the transition to a police state. Just as one of many examples, four decades ago, the phrase "lock down" was used for one place, a prison during riot or violence incident. Now it is used for schools and major cities.
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The idea is to have high res cameras to be able to catch everyone, everywhere, guilty of something or not.
In the same spirit as the USSR. They didn't have this fancy tech, but they tried. What many people don't know is that their law enforcement was terrible, in the sense of catching the bad guys. They simply wanted to sniff up everybody's butt. Some people like doing that, and will use anything to rationalize it. But honest-to-goodness law enforcement actually requires work, lots of it, and leads to fewer sweetheart contracts for useless equipment. American law enforcement is better is better precisely because
Don't get arrogant (Score:4, Insightful)
What people don't understand is that for facial recognition software to work you have to have good quality cameras, images, a more static environment. This is why you hear about it being used in casinos is Las Vegas and elsewhere. In those environments you have high quality cameras with close range and good angles working against a smaller set of good pictures in a relatively static environment (people in casinos tend to congregate and not move around a lot). You also have staff with a distinct vested interest in watching out for their 'bad guys'.
In a place like a large public venue you have lower quality cameras, far more people running around, worse angles and range and the environment is far more transient. The tool is being used in a completely different environment with far less support and far larger data sets to work with.
It's like taking your Rav4 off-roading the Rubicon trail and coming way with the conclusion that off-roading is a bunch of hype. You've taken the tool (grocery getter) and put it to use for a job it was never meant for. Meanwhile your guy with the old Jeep knows for a fact that his tools works for the job because he uses it for that job on a routine basis, however he would be just as foolish to except his jeep to work as well as a daily grocery getter as a Rav4.
Until the tools are put into environments that allow them to succeed, and with the hardware that they need they will continue to fail. You could call it a failing of the tool, however the tools and hardware are immature. Give it another five years and this would be a very different story. It's just technology advancing and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it short of getting hold of your politician and demanding reforms or limits on it's use.
The Monsters are due on Maple Street (Score:2)
Reddit was just a larger version of Maple Street.
http://www.tv.com/shows/the-twilight-zone/the-monsters-are-due-on-maple-street-12606/
Obligatory (Score:2)
That's what they WANT you to think...
Re:CRAFT INTERNATIONAL (Score:5, Insightful)
Can anyone explain the presence of Craft International (Security Contractors) at the marathon?
Do Security Contractors frequently monitor events like this?
Maybe they were hired by the Boston Marathon. Or maybe your tinfoil hat is loose.
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Sure they do. They just charge more by the hour and it's tough to get a hotel room that will let them in.
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No, they spelled it wrong. It's actually Kraft International, and they were there to provide carb load services. They're labeled a "security contractor" because runners cannot be secure in their possessions while hungry.
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The newspaper said find him and they found him. So it double succeeded, just the paper was wrong about him being involved.
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Citizen! Do not question the integrity of the site! Mandatory government monitoring of your traffic is for your own protection!
Or maybe a bunch of nerds are too lazy to update their certs.
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