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:Wasn't It As Much Individual Photog & ID? (Score:3, Funny)
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: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:4, Funny)
Best if every face scanned is shown on screen next to the original and beep.
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...
Re:CRAFT INTERNATIONAL (Score:3, Funny)
Sure they do. They just charge more by the hour and it's tough to get a hotel room that will let them in.